Writing Feature Stories

How to research and write articles - from listicles to longform

Matthew Ricketson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000248418
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Good writing engages as it informs and feature journalism offers writers the opportunity to tell deep, affecting stories that look beyond the immediate mechanics of who, what, where and when and explore the more difficult-and more rewarding- questions: how and why? Whether you're a blogger, a news journalist or an aspiring lifestyle reporter, a strong voice and a fresh, informed perspective remain in short supply and strong demand; this book will help you craft the kind of narratives people can't wait to share on their social media feeds. Writing Feature Stories established a reputation as a comprehensive, thought-provoking and engaging introduction to researching and writing feature stories. This second edition is completely overhauled to reflect the range of print and digital feature formats, and the variety of online, mobile and traditional media in which they appear.This hands-on guide explains how to generate fresh ideas; research online and offline; make the most of interviews; sift and sort raw material; structure and write the story; edit and proofread your work; find the best platform for your story; and pitch your work to editors.'A wide-ranging, much-needed master class for anyone who tells true yarns in this fast-changing journalistic marketplace' - Bruce Shapiro, Columbia University 'Useful and thought provoking' - Margaret Simons, journalist and author 'A must read for any digital storyteller who wants to write emotive, engaging, believable content.' - Nidhi Dutt, foreign correspondent

1
WHY FEATURE STORIES MATTER

A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

Thomas Mann

One of the great things about the internet is that it’s made everyone a writer; one of the terrible things about the internet is that it’s made everyone a writer. That’s a paradox, yes, but the two can co-exist. It is more profitable to resist seeing things as an ‘either/or’ and view them instead as a ‘both’. We live in a world where we not only continually graze a myriad of sources of news, views, shares, likes and more on our screens and mobile devices but we also continually blog, tweet, share, post and upload. This means we all read a lot more and write a lot more than we did in the past, which should be good for communication, and in many ways it is. Skills that were once specialist, like typing, are now widespread. People feel freer to express their thoughts and feelings. They use the web’s many features to strengthen their self-expression.

You would think this would make communication in general and journalism in particular a doddle, a round of drinks, a flip of an egg. But somehow it doesn’t. You’re sceptical? Ask yourself how many pieces you have read recently that you remember. How many have made you laugh out loud or brought tears to your eyes or made you boil with outrage? How often have you stopped reading and thought, ‘Wow, this is beautifully written’ or ‘That is a really witty line’? In our experience it happens far less frequently than it should, given that we are all writers now. Look again at the aphorism above attributed to Thomas Mann, an early twentieth century German novelist: ‘A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.’ Was Mann being ironic? Writers with a capital ‘W’ are known for agonising over every word. Or perhaps the Nobel prize winner was drawing our attention to the craft, even the art, of good writing. Writing the first thing that comes into your head is one thing; writing a post that says something interesting and really connects with readers is another. The former approach might yield the odd hit single but that’s all. ‘Writing is thinking on paper,’ as the late William Zinsser often said. Your first thought on a topic may be a flash of insight or it may be a thought bubble.

Perhaps the act of writing something that people will remember or respond to or even simply read to the end is not as simple as it seems. If you are going to write feature articles, though, you need to do research—as much as or probably more than for a news story—you need to make sense of masses of information that may be complicated or contested, and then you need to write something that is both accurate and entertaining, or at the least engaging.

We know this from first-hand experience. In this book’s first edition, Matthew recalled both his delight in exploring issues and events for features and his anxiety in constructing a coherent, readable piece. For this second edition, Matthew has been joined by Caroline Graham, a journalist and academic at Bond University, whose experience of feature writing has been both similar and different, as she recalls:

Most of my early attempts at feature writing were snuck into the regional daily I worked at. It wasn’t that the paper disliked features—actually, it was a local outlet deeply connected to its community and their personal stories. But the paper had a long-held culture of relegating features to what were seen as the softer parts of the paper: supplements, or weekend reads.

There were good reasons for this: we had a small staff, and a lot to do. Most days a reporter would write three or four articles, and on a particularly busy day you might need to double that output. Under a tight deadline the staple news structure—the inverted pyramid—is quick and effective.

One of my first ‘guerilla’ features was about a house fire. I wasn’t long out of uni and I was nervous. Driving up to the property, I could smell the smoke from a few kilometres away, even with the car windows up. The family who owned the house had two little girls who were peering over the fence at the damage. One of them asked her mum about the poster she’d been making for homework all weekend, worried she’d be in trouble when she didn’t bring anything to school on Monday. And then the other girl realised—with sudden, complete horror—that their two pet goldfish had been inside, sitting on the kitchen bench. Would they have survived, she asked everyone. They were sitting in water, after all. It was clear they hadn’t, but nobody had the heart to tell her. The house was a husk—the blaze had taken everything. Later, the firefighters would tell me that a house fire burns at almost 600 degrees Celsius. From spark to embers, it had taken twelve minutes to destroy everything the family owned.

Listening as the family made a sort of informal inventory of loss—the grief of each new, tiny thing raw and palpable—I wondered how I could possibly encompass the actual damage in a lead like ‘Local family loses house in overnight blaze’. Instead, I wrote a feature. The loss was in the details, especially the pet fish and the school project.

Looking back, I’m sure that what I produced wasn’t—by any stretch—a great feature. But I know it said more than an inverted pyramid story ever could have.

For me, the point of a feature is taking something uncomfortable—something upsetting or uplifting, something you question, something that makes you angry—and conveying some of that experience to an audience. It’s a format that attempts to address the lingering questions that the inverted pyramid just can’t answer. If your readers are moved to reaction, action, question, or realisation then you’ve got it right.

Of course, different people learn how to write features in different ways. For a few the craft of telling true stories comes easily, but for many it doesn’t. This has something to do with the task, which is deceptively complex, but it also has something to do with the way the news media constructs the world. That is to say the news media sees the world through the prism of news values—currency, time-liness, prominence and the like, which we’ll revisit in detail in the next chapter. What is notable here is, first, the word ‘values’ signals that news and journalism are underpinned by subjective assumptions rather than objective scientific laws. Editors assume people want to receive news as soon as possible—timeliness—whereas scientists know the law of gravity exists. Second, the number of news values is limited to nine (the other six are impact, relevance, proximity, conflict, human interest and the unusual). Are these enough to encompass the breadth of life? Probably not. It may not be the job of news and journalism to provide a theory of existence or of knowledge but the nine news values do point to the limits of the news worldview.

Writing what is known in the industry as a hard news piece—that is, an article written in the style of an inverted pyramid, with the most important information in the first paragraph—is an act of selection, not stenography. Any news story we read today has inbuilt assumptions about what is important and what isn’t. This does not mean they are right or wrong, just that the assumptions rest on a set of values seldom articulated or debated. Even leaving aside contentious issues such as race or gender, the basic news story puts information in pride of place. And it prioritises certain kinds of information at that: election results, earthquakes, murders, gold medals, stock movements, scientific breakthroughs and so on. This is a drop in the ocean of information flowing through society. Much of the remainder is interesting and illuminating; much of it is unknown to readers, and much of it finds its way into feature articles.

The inverted pyramid formula has proved an extraordinarily durable way of conveying important information quickly and concisely. Even the recent communication form of the 140-character-long tweet is used by journalists to report news as it breaks. The rapid dissemination of important information in hard news, though, strips out emotion and vaults over analysis. It is unable to set events in context; in the words of the American novelist and journalist Norman Mailer, news is forever ‘munching nuances like peanuts’.¹ Hard news, then, fails to attend to the breadth of readers’ needs and tastes. Driven by news values, the inverted pyramid excludes a good deal, with strange results. There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in a news editor’s philosophy. To continue the Shakespearean analogy, consider the world’s most famous play, Hamlet, rendered as news. What might the lead be? ‘Fortinbras, the Prince of Norway, is tipped to become the next King of Denmark after the entire Danish royal family was slaughtered by its own members during a night of revenge killings and cruel mishaps …’ Something is missing, and it is not just the blank verse.

At one level, we all know this. Hard news, with its fixed structure, formal tone and institutional worldview, has been the butt of jokes since at least the early 1960s through Michael Frayn’s novel The Tin Men and on David Frost’s television program That Was the Week That Was. If you haven’t heard of them (and let’s face it, the sixties happened a long time ago), you should know The Simpsons. Through Kent Brockman, the bombastic, bird-brained anchor of current affairs show Smartline, the program satirises the news media’s inability, as George Bernard Shaw put it, to distinguish between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilisation (‘I’ve been to Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, and I can say without hyperbole that this [Kamp Krusty] is a million times worse than all of them put together’) as well as its reflex reduction of any issue to a black and white dichotomy (‘Michelangelo’s David: is it classical art or just some guy with his pants down?’).

More seriously, the hard news approach flounders in conveying anything other than information. It corrals emotions into dry phraselets such as ‘visibly upset’. Feature stories, on the other hand, flesh out the daily news skeleton by revealing the emotions inherent in news stories and then clothe it by backgrounding and analysing the meaning of news events. To do that requires a different format from the inverted pyramid. Stories presented in straight news style usually run between 300 and 500 words, rarely much longer, but online, newspaper and magazine feature articles start at about 800 words and range up to 2500 words. These word lengths are shorter than they were a decade ago, which reflects the contest for readers’ attention amid the welter of available news and entertainment. There have always been features longer than 2500 words; journalism even extends to book-length work. The term now used for this part of the journalistic terrain is longform journalism, while those around 2500 words and shorter are features. A feature has to have information but it should also convey emotion and atmosphere and analyse events and issues. A feature needs a coherent structure, with an arresting opening, well-organised material and an ending that, in direct contrast to the hard news story, reaches a satisfying conclusion. The longer the feature, the more important structure and storytelling become.

Good features, in our view, are as important as hard news. About a century ago, the English newspaper proprietor Lord Northcliffe said, ‘It is hard news that catches readers. Features hold them.’ Amid the rush it is easy to forget that people read journalism to be entertained and moved as much as to be informed. They want to be told stories—they need to be told stories, you might argue. Storytelling is common across cultures and ages; it begins with saucer-eyed children at bedtime and ends only with death. It is a way of making sense of the world and a way of enabling people to identify with and perhaps understand other people’s lives. Neuroscientists have shown that empathy springs from what is called ‘experience sharing’ and ‘perspective taking’.² When we see something difficult or painful happening to another person we imagine ourselves having the same experience. We then reflect on how the other person has been affected. The triggering of empathy can be blocked, though, when people encounter others who are perceived as different.

A good feature enables us to look past the difference to see the common humanity. This is why in recent years successive governments have been determined to portray refugees as different from us—they are ‘illegals’ who fall prey to evil ‘people smugglers’—and hidden them away in offshore detention centres. What you can’t see you can’t relate to. Good features are the antidote for such poison, as Luke Mogelson showed in an extraordinary eyewitness account of Afghan citizens fleeing the Taliban and journeying thousands of kilometres to seek asylum in Australia. His article in The New York Times Magazine helped restore the Afghans’ humanity in our eyes.³ Journalists, then, along with novelists, artists and film-makers, are among those members of society whose role is to tell stories. Should journalists insist on their duty as objective seekers of facts, let them look to their own vernacular where they talk about getting a ‘story’ or a ‘yarn’. Where journalists do differ from novelists is that the stories they tell are true—or as true as they can make them in the time available.

The demands of researching and writing a series on, say, the global environmental threat posed by box jellyfish may be of a different order to compiling a BuzzFeed listicle about ‘24 batshit-insane facts about Bolivia’, but once journalists venture beyond the familiar inverted pyramid formula of the basic news story they need to be more conscious of their role as storytellers. Readers will put up with the hard news format for 500 words but not for a 2000-word piece.

The core messages of this book, then, are threefold:

1. Feature writing is fun

Many students and journalists find the form of the straight news story rigid and impersonal. Writing features offers the opportunity to be creative. You can find your own journalistic voice, you can write with zest and bite and, in varying degrees, you can express your views. After a while, many working journalists also find the nature of straight news constricting. The same stories seem to keep coming round year after year and they want to explore an event or an issue in depth. The way to do that is through feature stories.

2. Feature writing is hard work

Many think creativity in journalism means you kick back in your chair, call on the muse for some incandescent prose and wait for the accolades to roll in. This notion is as misplaced as it is persistent; sadly, you can’t keep a good myth down. As we’ve already said, writing a compelling feature story requires more research than most news stories, with more care and attention paid to the writing.

3. Feature writing is important

Conventionally, news sits atop the newsroom hierarchy so it is worth remembering that when a panel of judges met to determine the one hundred best works of twentieth century American journalism, they chose a long feature to be number one. It was John Hersey...