What Newspaper Readers Want to Read!-Feature and Coloumn Writing-Lecture Handout, Exercises of Mass Communication

Download What Newspaper Readers Want to Read!-Feature and Coloumn Writing-Lecture Handout and more Exercises Mass Communication in PDF only on Docsity! LESSON 13 THE NEWSPAPER FEATURE STORY IDEA What newspaper readers want to read! Newspapers try to perform five roles. There are lovely formal names for these roles—names such as the commercial, information, opinion, public forum and entertainment functions. But readers, who are not at all interested in the functions’ fancy formal names, call the various parts of the newspaper package “advertising, news, editorials, letters to the editor,” and “the comics.” The names the readers use are self-explanatory, with the exception of “the comics.” What readers really mean when they talk about comic strips is the newspaper’s ability to entertain and emotionally and intellectually intrigue with material ranging from column to the crossword puzzle to the funny feature story about the local issue or a person. Comics, columns, crosswords and features are extremely important to readers. The basic secret to writing features that readers will like is to recall that although features come in both news and timeless varieties, they are, more importantly, also thing- or people-oriented. A feature about how tombstones are manufactured would be a “thing” story, of course, but an article about the woman and her wondrous bird would be essentially a “people” story. Which would you rather read? Probably reader will select man and dog story because strong features are almost always people stories. In addition, the story has some traditional news characteristics that add to reader appeal. News characteristics: qualities such as conflict, human interest, importance, prominence, proximity, timeliness and unusualness. Let’s look at each quality and see how these characteristics can add punch to a feature story. Conflict Most of us live our lives with little major daily conflict which may explain why professional football and boxing are so exciting to some people. Thus, real-life conflict is unusual and interesting for most of us. Consequently, an explanatory feature examining why a 12-year-old Florida boy killed his mother and little brother fascinated readers of The Miami Herald. And a profile tracing a mother’s year-long successful search for her missing 15-year-old daughter had equal appeal for readers. Conflict comes down to this: Would you rather read a story about a dramatic, emotional cross-country search for a missing child or a business story about a wealthy local woman who opened a boutique specialising in Scottish woollens? Human interest Human interest is hard to define for a few. Most editors say stories about children, animals or sex have automatic human-interest value. So do stories about health. Consequently, a story about a little girl and her father combing the city for her missing puppy has guaranteed reader appeal. So does a medical feature about a young woman struggling to cope with acquired immune deficiency syndrome or one about a doctor at a hospital trying to find a cure for baldness? Importance Importance refers to universality. The more people affected by the subject of a feature, the more readers the story will attract. For example, a how-to story advising readers of a clever way to cut home electricity bills by 50 percent has more importance—and probably more readers—than a how-to feature about constructing a farm house. Why? Bringing down the electric bill has more appeal to most people than does constructing a farmhouse. docsity.com Prominence The Chief Minister of the province has prominence. Most probably, your best friend does not. A hobbyist story about the governor’s stamp collection has more reader appeal than a story about your friend’s similar collection. Names make news, the saying goes. Names also make features. Proximity Proximity simply means closeness to your readers. A story about someone who lives a thousand miles from the newspaper’s readers has less appeal than a similar story about someone in the newspaper’s home circulation area. So, an odd-occupation feature about a local university professor who junks his teaching career to open an auto salvage yard has more reader appeal than does a story about a lawyer in another province, who decides to become a pianist. Timeliness means little to feature writers, unless they are writing a news feature. Unusualness However, unusualness is extremely important to the feature writer. A university teacher who turns junkman is, in fact, unusual. A junkyard owner who earns his doctor of philosophy degree and becomes a university teacher is equally unusual. On the other hand, a male registered nurse is less unusual, and probably is not worth a story. Verification is the key to deciding if a story is truly unusual. Is your trapper the most experienced or the best known? Is he the most successful, or is he at least typical? Do other trappers respect him? Of course, you can write a feature without conflict, human interest, importance, prominence, proximity or unusualness, but if your feature has none of these qualities, it is probably not going to be very interesting. And dull features don’t appeal to anyone except perhaps the subject of the article. How to get ideas If you become a reporter, who occasionally receives a feature assignment, you will rarely have to worry about unearthing feature story ideas. The ideas will come from your editor, and your most serious problem probably will be transforming the editor’s occasional sows’ ears into silk purses. On the other hand, if you are a full-time newspaper feature writer—especially one assigned to a Sunday magazine or a features section—you will be expected to formulate many of your own assignments. Pulitzer Prize-winner Madeleine Blais explains why: “At a magazine of a newspaper, usually the editors will allow a writer to pick stories because they don’t want writers spending months on material they don’t like.” Feature writers get ideas from a variety of sources. They read newspapers and magazines both for national articles that can be localised and for area news stories that can be turned into features. That process is called “writing off the news.” Feature writers often have long, neglected story lists. Most of stories are self-assigned, but always appreciate a good suggestion. Sometimes writers turn to the feature category first. For example, if you want to write an odd-occupation story, you might chose the occupation first and find the specific subject later. Feature writers also keep their eyes and ears open. They read billboards and advertisements in the Yellow Pages, watch television, and listen to the radio, all in quest of ideas. They also tell friends that they’re looking for good stories and, often, friends tip them about people, places and things worth writing about. Invariably, the ideas pour in—some worth investigating, others not, but all requiring focus. Focusing ideas Focus is simply a matter of reducing a potentially large quantity or material into digestible components. When you go to a fast-food restaurant, you don’t order a cow. You order a hamburger. When you write a term paper for a world history class, you don’t choose a mega-topic such as “The History of Germany.” Instead, you focus the topic on something such as “The Political Factors in the Selection of Berlin as Capital of Germany.” And similarly, when you select a feature story topic, you don’t begin with an idea such as “missing children.” You narrow the topic to a bite-sized chunk such as “teenaged runaways.” docsity.com