All about feature writing

Some Tips and Tricks

Feature Writing, Marshall Soules, 2004

Features are not meant to deliver the news firsthand. They do contain elements of news, but their main function is to humanize, to add colour, to educate, to entertain, to illuminate. They often recap major news that was reported in a previous news cycle. Features often:

* Profile people who make the news
* Explain events that move or shape the news
* Analyze what is happening in the world, nation or community
* Teach an audience how to do something
* Suggest better ways to live
* Examine trends
* Entertain.

The art and craft of feature writing

For a two-day engagement, William E. Blundell brought the live performance of his book, "The Art and Craft of Feature Writing," to the Detroit Free Press.

Blundell played himself; the cast included an assortment of imaginary friends and pet peeves. In one scene, Blundell had drinks and talked story with the intelligent, interested and totally imagined friend whom Blundell writes for -- and who reels him back in when his writing gets gassy and bloated.

Poynter Online - Reviving the Feature Story

Roy Peter Clark

Readers like stories, even news stories, written in "feature style," according to the Readership Institute. And since the invention of the human-interest story, the feature has had the beneficial effect of expanding the universe of newspaper readers while enriching our definition of news.

Feature stories offer news of the emotions is the way Jon Franklin, twice a Pulitzer winner, has described it to me.

News Feature Writing (Dennis G. Jerz, Seton Hill University)

This page offers a brief analysis of a newspaper feature -- a human
interest story that is not closely tied to a recent news event.
Children polish writing at camp
Headli

Nieman Narrative Digest - Interview with Jon Franklin

The story has a lot of aspects. It has character, meaning, plot. As a reporter, when you find any one of these you can connect the dots and find all the others. Often one bit of trouble the reporter will get into is that we're all living multiple stories at once. So they try to report the hottest parts of four stories, but you can't do that. You have to pick one. If you don't it'll be a bloody mess. You see a lot of that problem. People try to do the top of three or four stories.

Some of the best

feature examples to learn from

2006 Pulitzer Winner: The Final Salute

Rocky Mountain News reporter Jim Sheeler and photographer Todd Heisler spent the past year with the Marines stationed at Aurora's Buckley Air Force Base who have found themselves called upon to notify families of the deaths of their sons in Iraq. In each case in this story, the families agreed to let Sheeler and Heisler chronicle their loss and grief. They wanted people to know their sons, the men and women who brought them home, and the bond of traditions more than 200 years old that unite them.

Jon Franklin - Mrs Kelly's Monster

In the cold hours of a winter morning Dr. Thomas Barbee Ducker, chief brain surgeon at the University of Maryland Hospital, rises before dawn. His wife serves him waffles but no coffee. Coffee makes his hands shake.

In downtown Baltimore, on the 12th floor of University Hospital, Edna Kelly's husband tells her goodbye. For 57 years Mrs. Kelly shared her skull with the monster: No more. Today she is frightened but determined.

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