Despite dwindling attention spans and the rise of shortform content on social media, there is still a demand for longer articles which offer an in-depth look at a person or subject. Here’s how you can recognise a feature story and the main differences it has to a news story.
Engaging content
As people increasingly seek to stop endless scrolling, there seems to be a resurgence of the feature article, which offers engaging content that holds the reader’s attention for more than a few seconds.
Covering a topic in-depth, whether it’s a piece of news, a profile or a human interest story, offers a journalist the chance to get behind the basic facts and really explore the heart of it. In the modern, digital world, feature writing now includes a combination of writing, video, images and illustrations to create interactive content.
Students who choose to do a journalism degree, which are now offered at a wide variety of colleges such as //schoolofjournalism.co.uk are taught how to write both news and features and how to write for websites and social media.
Traits of a feature story
Unlike news, which focuses on the ‘who, what, when, where, why’ structure, features have a more narrative structure which gradually draws a reader in. A journalist will have spent time doing interviews and fact-checking before deciding how to structure their piece and reveal key pieces of information and quotes to keep the reader engaged right until the end.
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