Feature Writing and Reporting. Jennifer Brannock Cox
more than 1,000 homes in 2018, Los Angeles Times reporter Joseph Serna spoke with a man who had lost his wife and two great-grandchildren. Serna used the man’s story as one example of how the community reacted to the destructive fires. This excerpt illustrates how his story is one of many:
Ed Bledsoe cradled the stone in his calloused right palm, using his thumb to scrape away a layer of dust and ash. Finding nothing but a gray, smooth surface, he hunched over and tossed it back into the dirt.
The Carr [Powerhouse Road] fire had destroyed his home and killed his wife and two great-grandchildren. Bledsoe was looking for something to hang on to, even if it was just the rainbow-painted rock 4-year-old Emily had decorated.
“The paint would’ve survived” the searing heat, he said.
The fire took pretty much everything else. His wife, Melody. The great-grandchildren they were raising: James, 5, and Emily. A firefighter who had tried to warn residents of the coming danger. Another resident who could not get out in time. More than a thousand homes across Shasta County.
—JOSEPH SERNA, Los Angeles Times5
Understanding issues on a larger scale can be difficult or uninteresting for readers. Localizers are reaction pieces detailing how issues affecting the larger city, state, nation or world are impacting the local community. These can help readers process how broader national decisions and world events affect their daily lives. Think about ways you can go deeper following a national or state legislative decision. For example, suppose your state passes a new law banning plastic bags at local stores. How can you capture reactions from your community?
Who would you talk to? Local shoppers, grocery store managers, retail store managers and environmentalists.
What records can you get? How many plastic bags are used each year in your town? What effects have they had on the local environment and wildlife? How much money will this save local retailers and cost customers?
What do you want to know? Are people feeling pleased or inconvenienced by the new law? How do store managers think the law will affect their businesses? What are environmentalists hoping to achieve, and what do they think will happen next?
Human Interest Features
Human interest stories attempt to relate life experiences to readers. Stories like these can focus on ordinary people doing extraordinary things, often involving elements of tragedy and/or inspiration. They may also examine the personal lives of well-known people, such as celebrities, politicians, athletes and prominent business leaders. These stories are often written as profiles—articles focused on a particular person and some aspect of their life that is unique. Profiles resonate with readers because they explore human experiences that are often relatable to the audience.
Human interest features tell someone else’s story and require a lot of time and attention. At magazines, reporters may spend weeks following sources, getting to know their routines and personality. Writing a human interest feature often pushes reporters to immerse themselves in the story and truly observe subjects in their everyday setting. Because the reporter is along for the ride, many profiles begin with an anecdote to help set the scene for readers. This opening anecdote from Charlotte Observer reporter Théoden Janes illustrates the primary source’s emotions and thought processes, giving the reader insight into the source’s mindset:
Carolyn Hart was a little hesitant to tell her father that she was planning to jump out of a perfectly good airplane 10,000 feet above western North Carolina.
So she waited until the night before to call him, then held her breath.
He reacted, of course, exactly the way she’d feared:
“Ohhhhhh, do you think it’s too late for me to get to be able to join you?” Jack Hart asked.
Carolyn had rehearsed her response: “Yeah, sorry, Dad—they’re booked up. I don’t think they would let you jump anyway.”
But the next morning, when the folks at Skydive Central North Carolina called to say the weather in Maiden looked a bit too cloudy for a good jump and apologized and asked to schedule a makeup date, Carolyn Hart knew. She wasn’t going to be able to wiggle her way out of this one. And he wasn’t going to drop it.
She knew her father—who turns 100 years old on Aug. 13—was going to do everything he could to make sure that when Carolyn finally did go up in that little prop plane, he’d be sardined into the seat next to her, ready to go skydiving for the first time in his life.
—THÉODEN JANES, Charlotte Observer6
When writing human interest stories, conducting good interviews is crucial. We will explore tactics for conducting in-depth feature interviews in Chapter 4.
Narrative Features
Narrative writing is as close to dramatic playwriting as journalism gets. Narratives dive deeply into a story, using characters, setting and plot to immerse the reader. Using the narrative writing technique requires thorough reporting and descriptive writing to uncover details that will help readers imagine they are on the scene. Careful observation of your sources and the scene are essential.
From the Field
Building Descriptive Narration
Adjectives should be used sparingly in journalistic writing, so it is important to choose the right ones. Selecting the right words to describe a character depends on keen observational skills. Show, don’t tell.
Figure 2.5 Telling
In telling rather than showing, you are making an opinionated statement: “Colson works hard.” Instead of inserting your own assessment of the dancer’s work ethic, show the reader with a narration based on observed details, as illustrated in Figure 2.5. Think about the character as if you are building steps up to a landing. Starting with the most basic details, which are still essential to the story, imagine how you can add to a general description to create an illustration for your audience, like Figure 2.6.
Figure 2.6 Showing
Narrative writing shares some similarities with human interest profiles in that careful character development is key. Unlike profiles, which are primarily focused on the story of a particular person or group, narratives use sources to illustrate a larger issue at play. They often rely heavily on dialogue and flashbacks from main characters to help explain how an issue came to be. Washington Monthly magazine reporter Mariah Blake used narration to talk about problems with America’s health care system.7 She used a primary character—medical device maker Thomas Shaw—to illustrate the larger problems facing the industry. Blake sets the scene in this excerpt, showing us Shaw’s frustration by using vivid imagery and dialogue:
When Thomas Shaw gets worked up, he twists in his chair and kneads his hand. Or he paces about in his tube socks grumbling, “They’re trying to destroy us,” and “The whole thing is a giant scam.” And Shaw, the founder of a medical device maker called Retractable Technologies, spends a lot of time being agitated.
Blake also uses physical descriptions of the character, as well as his own recollections of his beginning, to get the reader more invested in the story and visualizing the scene:
Thomas Shaw is a lanky fifty-nine-year-old man with dark eyes and a shock of gray hair that gives him a bit of a mad scientist air. Growing up, he lived in Mexico and Arizona, where his father worked as a chemist (among other things, the elder Shaw invented the first nitrogen test for plants). Shaw describes his childhood home as a kind of frenetic laboratory where science and math problems were worked out on a chalkboard that hung over the dinner table.