Lyle's Law tells you why. In this sense, narrative journalism coexists easily with Lippmann and Lyle. Telling the particulars is telling what happened, and the narrative form is one way to do it. But it is a limited way, fraught with difficulties. One trouble is that narrative journalism is not regarded as merely conveying the particulars of an event.
Journalists know it as a form of writing aimed at storytelling.
It is usually sequential and anecdotal, so as to introduce real people and their actual experiences. Since the narrative is aimed at storytelling, it is concerned with beginnings, middles and endings and plots developed through the action and dialoguejust like the well made short story that literature students study. Readers remember stories, journalists are told. Start them with a scene that holds their attention. A female companion also fell but was unhurt.