Being a feature writer

Last year an excellent reporter left our community newspaper for bigger opportunities and I lost an excellent Ninja Journalism guest blogger. See Jennifer Ritters' posts here, here and here.

Jennifer is a good reporter and a gifted feature writer as well, which added greatly to the paper.

Accidents, crime, city council reports and school district news are interesting and important.  However, what readers dearly want is to know is the community around them and the people who make it special.

Don’t believe me? Attend a city council meeting without a hot-button topic on the agenda and then go to a grass-roots benefit event. Notice the difference in attendance? People care about people, and your news outlets should reflect that with quality feature stories.

I cover news with dedication but I LOVE writing features, and readers love them as well.

I rarely get a compliment on an important news pieces I busted my butt on but I received glowing emails after my feature on the shy, always-picked-last student who loved his school and team so much he graduated, went to trade school and returned to get a job as sports equipment and grounds manager. I sometimes start my best features and photos on the upper fold of my front pages and found these papers flew off the racks compared to having a front page picture of a city council member.

1. Look for the positive. Take a fresh look at your community and instead of looking for what needs to be fixed, look at what is working.
2. Know that everyone has a story. You just need to be a good enough reporter to find it.
3. Read good features. I teach “If you are going to be a good writer, you have to be a good reader.” If you want to be a sizzling romance author, you better be a hungry reader of such. The same is true of features.
4. Learn not to be a just news reporter. Writing features often requires patients, sensibility and sometimes compassion. Other posts on Ninja Journalism contain examples of how to talk with people, break the ice, make people comfortable how to find stories.

If you don’t have a good feature writer, get one. If you can’t afford one, be one.

What seems like trivial information to a news story can be developed into a feature. I was reporting a basic sports story about an outstanding student athlete and found she has a graduated older sister and mother who were all track champions as well. I did not simply mention the family in the story, I interviewed them all, included photos of each in sports action, and made that family prodigy of champions the focus of my story.

Here are a couple of my features already posted on Ninja Journalism:

Amazing cancer cure story

A peaceful storm

I encourage you to put the “human” in human interest stories.

Humans are interesting. Just ask one and find out.

Share your thoughts at amosnews@yahoo.com