The current paper presents some early results of the FakeNarratives project illustrating how narrative audiovisual strategies might begin to be addressed at variable scales. Several distinct kinds of narrative strategies have been discussed in the journalism and newsreporting literature, but for the purposes of our first case study we focus on the production of ‘individual-centered narrative’ by means of editing devices such as showing layperson’s talk, individualized events and actions, close- ups of individual faces, and emotion shown either visually or exhibited in accompanying language. These features appear to be widely used across alternative and public news outlets (Vettehen et al., 2008). Our research hypothesis is that both kinds of news outlets use narrative strategies to some degree, but that there may still be significant differences in why and how often they are actually used. We consider it highly implausible that the use of narrative strategies can be reduced to any binary “good vs. bad” or “informing vs. dis-informing” characterisation and so more finely discriminating accounts are in any case necessary. The basic challenge we address here is then to set out how hypotheses concerning narrative construction may be made amenable to larger-scale data analysis.