Feature Writing for Journalists

Sharon Wheeler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000576696
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Feature Writing for Journalists considers both newspapers and magazines and helps the new or aspiring journalist to become a successful feature writer.

Using examples from a wide range of papers, specialist and trade magazines and 'alternative' publications, Sharon Wheeler considers the different types of material that come under the term 'feature' including human interest pieces, restaurant reviews and advice columns.

With relevant case studies as well as interviews with practitioners, Feature Writing for Journalists is exactly what you need to understand and create exciting and informative features.

1

Setting out your features stall

Long ago and far away when I was a cub reporter, I used to watch the features desk with ill-disguised envy. The writers all looked terribly sophisticated in their little annexe, surrounded by review copies of books and all manner of other intriguing freebies. I wanted to be a features writer so I could recline in my seat, chewing the end of my pen (yes, this was pre-computers) and spend as long as I wanted pondering well-turned phrases, hob-nobbing with celebrities and testing swanky new moisturisers.

Naturally my dreams were shattered once I discovered the deadlines were just as fierce and that a worrying number of famous people were the sort you would cross a busy motorway in rush hour to avoid – particularly when you were the twelfth journalist they’d been forced to talk to that day. Celebrities could be dull and rude, just like anyone else, and crawling around the floor of a deserted office at Lord’s cricket ground looking for a phone point to file a colour piece twenty minutes past deadline with a sports editor screaming in your ear proved this feature writing lark wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.

But then there were the high spots – attending big sports fixtures, having endless books and CDs to review, and discovering one of your favourite Irish musicians was an absolute delight in person. A colleague summed it up to perfection when he said: ‘Beats working for a living!’

The newspaper supplement market exploded in the late 1980s and 1990s when virtually every publication, local and national, seemed to decide that bigger was most definitely better. Colour magazines, tabloid supplements, A5 listings guides, arts, sport, travel, books, style, motoring, media, business, personal finance – the list appeared endless, and provided a significant and expanded platform for features. Whereas previously writers were constrained by the fairly strict boundaries of a newspaper, the supplements provided ample opportunity to specialise and to produce features on weird and wonderful topics. The proliferation of lifestyle programmes on TV, such as Changing Rooms and Ground Force, was reflected in the print media, as we were treated to countless features on how to transform your home and garden. The desktop publishing revolution, meanwhile, helped the magazine market along, as it became possible for people to produce magazines relatively cheaply and easily, creating opportunities for writers wishing to specialise. And, as we shall see, publications are now adapting to the fast-moving online market.

WHAT IS A FEATURE?

The quick and dirty answer to this question is anything that isn’t news. But that’s a very limited definition when you start flicking through news-papers and magazines. Does the crossword count? And how about the TV reviews? What about the racecards on the sport pages? And can a heavyweight, authoritative feature on terrorism really come under the same category as a no-holds-barred comment piece on safe sex for gay men?

So what do we want from a feature? We want to be transported to places we’ll never visit. We want to savour the atmosphere of a big occasion. We want to be given an insight into a famous person’s life and what makes them tick. We want to be outraged when a miscarriage of justice is revealed. We want a complicated issue broken down into layperson’s terms for us by an expert writer. We want an armchair view of the gig we couldn’t attend.

It might help to think back to what news is:

• Topical – we want news, not history.

• Highly factual – as the chap in the old cop show Dragnet used to say: ‘Just the facts, ma’am!’

• Stylised – news generally conforms to an accepted formula, that of a pyramid (see below).

• Impersonally written – the reporter’s view isn’t required; opinion is provided by the people quoted in the story.

• Crisp – news stories are generally short and sharp. Look at how much information is packed into a tabloid news item.

By comparison, the list of what characterises a feature is significantly longer:

• Varied approach – there’s no one correct way to structure a feature.

• Individual voice from writer – a good feature writer will develop their own distinctive writing style; it may be amusing, deadpan or sarcastic, for example.

• Can involve personal thoughts, colour, description – the journalist may become part of the feature if they try out a new sport, or want to draw attention to an interviewee’s strange behaviour. They can describe a big event, and comment on what they see.

• Longer than news – features have room to breathe. Some of those in magazines or weekend newspaper supplements may run to several thousand words.

• Involve narrative background – there is far more space in a feature for the journalist to ink in background information; in a news story this may be restricted to one or two brief paragraphs.

• Wide use of quotes and dialogue – news stories will, of course, include quotes, but there are usually fewer of them. A feature writer has the luxury of more space for quotes, and even including snatches of dialogue where two or more people may be talking.

• May have a more distant deadline – news stories are generally written to tight deadlines. Features pages in newspapers may be prepared a day or more in advance; magazine deadlines may be three months hence.

There is no one correct way to write a feature. Trainee journalists are advised that the inverted pyramid (or a right way up pyramid, depending on who you listen to) is the textbook way to write a news story, with the juicy facts up top, and the less interesting padding at the bottom, where it can be cut easily if necessary. But when it comes to features, you will find that almost anything goes, ranging from first-person, eyewitness accounts, through the old faithful question-and-answer (Q&A) format, to a formal ‘he said, she said’ style.

And there is no one spot in the paper where you are guaranteed to find features, although the growth of supplements has meant they proliferate in those sections. They may be sprinkled throughout the paper, or have regular slots (women’s issues, sport, lifestyle, arts). You are guaranteed to find a cluster of comment pieces around the editorial and op ed (opposite editorial) pages in papers, or significant review sections in music magazines.

By reading a range of papers and magazines, you will get a good idea of what kinds of features interest editors and in what style the pieces are written. Being familiar with a range of publications gives you a clue as to what sorts of writers they welcome. Newspapers cultivate their big-name feature writers, but even though a lot of high-quality writing appears in magazines, most people would be hard pressed to name any magazine feature writers – it’s a land where the designer often seems to be king!

SPOTTING FEATURES

The following list isn’t necessarily exhaustive, and you may find that terminology differs depending on who you deal with and where you work (for instance, profiles are sometimes known as personality pieces). But it will start to give you a feel for the vast range of features out there – and also kick-start your ideas bank.

• News features: an in-depth look at a story in the news.

• Backgrounders: digs deeper into a current news story, sometimes including historical information.

• Retrospectives: a look at a story from way back, often with an anniversary angle.

• Investigative features: uncovering information that isn’t known, or that someone wants to keep hidden.

• Specialist features: these will be based on a particular area, be it education, arts, science, sport, travel or environment, for example.

• Profiles: an in-depth interview with a person. Sometimes known as personality pieces. You’ll also see mini-profiles used as case studies alongside news stories.

• Colour pieces: an atmosphere piece where a journalist gives a firsthand, eyewitness account of a story.

• Triumph over adversity (TOAs): features based on someone’s fightback from the brink of disaster. Much beloved of women’s magazines and tabloid Sunday magazines. Also known as TOT (triumph over tragedy).

• Formulaic features: these appear every day/week/month and follow a formula such as ‘Sixty Seconds with’, ‘Day in the Life of’, ‘Relative Values’, ‘A Room of My Own’.

• Think pieces: sometimes known as opinion pieces. They may be a written by someone with a specialist knowledge of a topic rather than by a journalist.

• Personal columns: again, these will appear weekly/monthly and generally with a picture byline for the reporter who writes the column.

• Reviews: a critical look at a new play, film, book, gig, CD, computer game, and so on.

This list includes the main features you’ll come across regularly in news-papers and magazines. Naturally, not every publication will house every type of feature – the Financial Times won’t go a bundle on the formulaic sort, while you won’t find heavyweight think pieces in Nuts or Bizarre. And while the Guardian will include profiles of gay couples taking part in civil partnerships, the Daily Mail is likely to be more interested in finding people to speak out against such partnerships.

FEATURES SCHEDULE

The best way to get a feel for who uses what is to take a look at which features are used in a range of publications. I’ve taken three UK newspapers from the same day (Friday, 15 August 2008) and listed the features that appeared in each. The comments in brackets are my explanations of what sort of feature the piece is and further clarification, if needed, of the context of the article.

The Sun

p. 7: We haven’t the heart to tell Pito he will never see mummy and daddy again (news story/news feature on a seven-year-old Georgian boy orphaned by a Russian bomb)

pp. 12–13: Swimply the best (news story/news feature on the Olympics, with the focus on swimmer Becky Adlington and her family – accompanied by four shorts on other athletes/news)

p. 22–23: Bling, booze, groupie sex and an early death. Sound modern? No it’s the Life of Byron (feature on the poet Lord Byron and how never-before-published letters about his female following have come to light)

pp. 34–35: Madonna was a middle-class girl pretending to be tough, a religious girl pretending to be irreligious, a prude pretending to be a pervert (Germaine Greer – described in the standfirst as the most outspoken feminist of her generation – looks at the singer Madonna, who is just about to turn fifty)

pp. 48–49: We’ve gone from 2nd gear to 5th in one movement (interview with Glasgow band Glasvegas as part of the ‘Something for the Weekend’ review section)

p. 50: I admit I’m retro … not a lot of emo going on (Q&A interview with musician Teddy Thompson, son of folk-rock legends Richard and Linda)

pp. 66–67 Heartbroken (interview with badminton star Gail Emms, whose Olympic gold-medal dream had just been dashed)

Daily Mail

p. 15: Kiss me quick! I’m retiring (after 118 years, Margate’s beach donkeys are being put out to grass because the owner is giving up to look after his sick mother)

pp. 22–23: Eye massagers, moustache protectors and other must-have gadgets (double-page picture spread showing some of the more unusual artefacts from a new exhibition at the British Library of Victorian and Edwardian inventions)

pp. 36–37: When do you start losing your looks? (a new poll of 4,000 women claims women start to worry about losing their looks at the age of twenty-eight. Eight writers aged between thirty-one and seventy-three give their views)

pp. 42–43: When my little girl was born with Down’s, I felt like I’d given birth to an alien and just wanted to get rid of her (a first-person piece by a mother about her baby)

pp. 46, 51, 54, 55: It’s the joy of X (feature on the return of TV show The X Factor – the main item in the ‘It’s Friday!’ section)

pp. 54–55: Dogs behaving badly (profile of actor Martin Clunes, focusing on his new TV show A Man and His Dogs – part of the ‘It’s Friday!’ section)

pp. 56–57: Fame? It can eat you up (profile of the soul singer Alicia Keys – part of the ‘It’s Friday!’ ...