That's a really interesting point: "to report facts without narratives." I hadn't thought of it that way, perhaps because reporters speak of their articles as "stories" and try to shape each into something coherent that has beginning, middle, and end just as fiction does. But it makes sense to me.

You're also right that Garcia Marquez never abandoned journalism but kept doing it after he'd written his great novels. That surprised a lot of critics, because for so many authors, novels do supplant journalism.