Feature Writing and Reporting. Jennifer Brannock Cox
to visualize the scene and better understand complicated issues like those in Blake’s article:
… Shaw finally came up with a crude prototype and found a local physician to test it on him—an event Shaw’s wife documented with a shaky handheld camcorder. In the video, the doctor holds up a saline-filled syringe about the size of a kielbasa sausage. Then he jabs the needle into Shaw’s arm and pauses for a second before pushing in the plunger. First the saline empties, and then the needle snaps back into the barrel with a pop.
Shaw had just invented the first retractable syringe, a fact that drew the attention of public health officials.
Throughout the story, the author hearkens back to the central point—Shaw is just one example of many people experiencing challenges as they try to bring change to the health care industry. Blake shows readers the “bigger picture” in this excerpt:
Stories like these abound among small suppliers, a number of whom have filed suit against GPOs [group purchasing organizations]. But most are wary of speaking out.
Narrative features are meant to take a reader through a story from beginning to end, much like a play or a novel. These types of in-depth stories can engross readers, helping them relate to the characters and imagine themselves in the scene. This makes them good candidates for social-media sharing.
Historical/Time Peg Features
Washington Post Executive Editor Philip L. Graham once called news “the first rough draft of history.” Journalists are responsible for documenting news events, preserving them for generations who will use lessons learned to make decisions about the future. But the value of news is not just its documentation; journalists’ ability to add context and meaning to those news events helps readers put the past, present and future in perspective.
Historical features can be used to help our readers learn about or reflect on important pieces of the community’s past. When conflicts flared in 2017 surrounding monuments honoring Civil War Confederate fighters, many journalists wrote articles explaining the history of protested statues, plaques and memorials in their community to help readers more fully understand the issues.
The controversial statue “Silent Sam” stands guard on-campus at UNC- Chapel Hill before it was toppled by protesters in 2018.
Yellowspacehopper at English Wikipedia via Wikimedia
Reporters Jane Stancill and Andrew Carter of The News & Observer in Raleigh, North Carolina, produced a detailed historical feature to help readers put the removal of Confederate monuments in perspective. Protestors pulled one such monument—a bronze statue of a Confederate soldier known as “Silent Sam”—from its platform near the entrance to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill campus in 2018. The event fueled shouts of excitement from people on one side of the argument and shouts of anger from those on the other. But most of all, the debate on what to do with the statue prompted confusion. Who was “Silent Sam”? Where had he come from? What had his significance been then, and what was it now? Stancill and Carter addressed these questions and more in their five-chapter article, which walks readers from the present to the past and then into the future, using a mix of archival documents and contemporary quotes to give readers a sense of how emotions have varied over the years and why conflicts over the statue rage on today.
The Whole Story
The Unfinished Story of Silent Sam, From “Soldier Boy” to Fallen Symbol of a Painful Past
By Jane Stancill and Andrew Carter, The News & Observer8
PROLOGUE: After standing for 105 years in the oldest part of the UNC-Chapel Hill campus, Silent Sam fell on Monday, pulled from his pedestal by the protestors’ tug of a rope. Immediately the news became cause for celebration and outrage: celebration for those who saw the statue as a racist symbol of white supremacy, as an ode to soldiers who fought, among other things, for the survival of slavery; outrage for those who viewed the statue as a tribute to Southern heritage, and to lives lost while soldiers fought for a cause they believed in.
To understand how Silent Sam fell is to understand how he rose. This is the story, told in five chapters, of the rise and fall of an 8-foot bronze, boyish depiction of a Confederate soldier who faced north, toward the enemy, for more than a century. It is a story whose final chapter has yet to be written.
Instead of using a traditional feature lede, Stancill and Carter opted for more of a narrative storytelling device, opening with a prologue detailing the current situation to help readers put the subsequent chapters into context as they go.
Chapter 1: The Soldier Boy
Chapter 1 takes the reader all the way back to the beginning of the story, answering the story’s basic questions: Who is Silent Sam, how did he get there, and what was his purpose?
On June 1, 1908, the Board of Trustees at UNC–Chapel Hill approved a request from the North Carolina division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy: The university supported a plan to build a Confederate monument.
The Civil War had been over for 43 years. In a time when the average life expectancy was around 50, the college students who’d left their campuses to fight in the war were becoming old men. In Chapel Hill, UNC President Francis Venable expressed a sudden urgency.
“I hope very much that this laudable purpose can be carried out,” Venable wrote in a March 1909 letter to the chairwoman of the U.D.C.’s monument committee. “You know that more than one thousand of the alumni entered the Confederate service and surely something should be done to perpetuate the patriotism and heroism of these noble sons of the university.”
And so began a five-year process to build the monument that became known as Silent Sam. In the beginning, the statue wasn’t going to be a statue at all, but instead what Venable, UNC’s president until 1913, described in a letter as a “memorial gateway to campus.”
The author quickly answers one of the primary questions readers have: Where did this statue come from, and why was it built? Readers may skim a historical feature looking for a simple answer. They don’t want to dig for it. Hopefully, they’ll get engaged in the story while searching and decide to stay.
By September 1909, Venable had come to agree with the opinion of Annie Hill Kenan, the chairwoman of the U.D.C.’s monument committee. Kenan had favored a statue, and in a Sept. 24, 1909, letter, Venable wrote that her original idea “was the wisest one.”
The university and the U.D.C. hoped to dedicate the statue at the 1911 commencement, on the 50th anniversary of the start of the war. Venable wrote of “a great reunion,” one that would include Confederate veterans.
Instead, cost concerns and a back-and-forth among Venable, the U.D.C. and the potential designers of the monument delayed the proceedings. By early 1910, Venable and the U.D.C. favored a design from John Wilson, a Boston-based sculptor. He originally asked for $10,000.
Venable feared the U.D.C. couldn’t raise the money. Wilson wrote back in late March 1910, pleading for the work: “I should very much like to undertake the Soldier Boy at this time,” he wrote, “as it appeals to me particularly.” He and Venable agreed on a cost of $7,500–$5,000 of which UNC alumni raised, with the additional $2,500 coming from the U.D.C.’s own fundraising.
It took another three years for the statue to become reality, amid fundraising challenges and debates about its location. At last, the statue arrived in time for a dedication in early June 1913. The ceremony began at 3:30 p.m., according to a program. A band played Dixie.
The North Carolina governor, Locke Craig, addressed a crowd of dignitaries. Venable spoke, too. The last scheduled speaker was Julian Carr, who was a UNC student until he left to fight for the Confederacy. Carr espoused the virtue of the South, and those who fought for its