The advent of the New Media and digital technology has promoted a search for new ways of expressing and communicating information. In journalism, a new trend, referred to as narrative style, has emerged. This style distances itself from traditional journalism by adopting techniques generally associated with storytelling. This article addresses the issue of whether a phenomenon which has been recognized and described by experts in a given discourse community (professional journalism) as a new style could be regarded by linguists as a new sub-genre of newspaper writing. In order to do this, a corpus of narrative-style news stories was compiled, and compared with a reference corpus of traditional news stories on the same topics. The corpora were analyzed both qualitatively and quantitatively. The qualitative analysis was aimed at detecting features related to the overall structure of the narrative-style articles, as well as formulating some working hypotheses for the quantitative analysis. By means of the quantitative analysis, the two corpora were compared for: keywords; lexical density; type/token ratio; word frequency; and use of adjectives. This preliminary analysis suggests that narrative journalism departs from traditional news writing, not only in terms of generic structure, but also in linguistic choices.