Before doing our huge feature story projects, we had a lecture on feature writing as a reminder of what is different between a feature and a traditional news story. As a BPW journalism major, I already had some background knowledge and experience doing features either for class or the Royal Purple. But the lecture gave us a good overview of what makes up a quality feature.
Features are not a news story, but can be inspired by a news story. It has at its heart, human interest and takes advantage of an expanded set of language and narrative strategies. A lot of feature stories are founded on creativity. Reporters must look for a different angle when setting up and writing features, otherwise your proposed feature probably isn’t one. Doing features also involve creative use of words, informs the public of an aspect of human life that escapes hard news, being subjective, is imperishable, and examines trends.
My feature was about how new communication technologies are changing schools, for better or for worse. Everyone knows that technology has become a large part of our society. A lot of the hard news stories revolving around technology are the latest inventions or developments of a technology. The most common example is the smartphone, and many media outlets write stories about what the latest smartphone is and what is different compared to previous phones. For my story, schools over the years have had to adapt to new technologies just in order to ensure continuing high-quality education. This interests a lot of people, particularly students and current professors because a lot of them have gone through this experience. Technologies in schools have been an ongoing trend for a long time, and I wanted to capture as many feature story qualities as possible in order to ensure myself and the public a very unique story.