Specialized Feature story

Specialized Feature story Chapter 7

Three staples • Sidebars • Profiles • Series – Most commonly assigned by editors

Sidebars and profiles • Any story that accompanies a main story, might be a little more than statistics, such as listings of polling places to be run with a story on an upcoming election, but like profiles they often tend to be “color” stories, whether they accompany a newspaper or magazine article

Series • Can be colorful, but can also be anything that interests you, your editors, your readers • Are often fact-filled and cover highly important topics

Deadline features sidebar • Written for newspapers, not magazines • Can be straight fact, but it’s often a feature story, strong on human interest • Accompanying straight-news story is usually breaking-news story • May run on the same page as straightnews story, or it may run on the jump page or another page altogether

Deadline features sidebar • Must be able to stand independently. That is, it must contain a tie-back to the main story or enough brief mention of the salient facts to enable readers to understand it even if they skipped the straight-news story • Often must be written with as much as as the straight-news story it accompanies • Details will be dictated by the news event

Profile • For newspapers, the line blurs between profiles/ personality pieces/ interviews • Most important difference is length. • Interviews have a basic news lead and then moves on to interview material • In-depth information needed

Series • Needed: Chunks of time and space • Thus, important subjects and issues (Budgets, tax cuts, water supply, poor) • Categories: Public service, investigative reporting, explanatory journalism, national and international reporting • Major anniversary: Replay of history

Series • Not straight news, inverted-pyramid style • Each installment is a one-shot story – Attention-getting lead – Enough of a tie-back to preceding installments to make the general topic comprehensible – Solid, preferably suspenseful ending – Excellent prose

New challenge • Specialized story and the Internet