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