The Final BIG Stories: The Issue and the In-Depth Feature

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In-Depth Stories: Features & Issues

Let’s talk a little about the two in-depth story assignments, The Feature/Profile and The Issue Story.

These stories—weighted more heavily than the stories from earlier in the semester—are “in-depth” because they involve more complex issues, require more reporting and sources, and run longer (say, 1,500 words or more) than the standard weekly story assignments. They are opportunities for you to delve deeply into topics that interest you, and into complex issues that require considerable research on your part in order to make them understandable for readers.

The In-Depth Feature or Profile

The in-depth feature (or profile) is a “softer” story that gives the reader an up-close and personal perspective on a place, event or person. These stories require subjects that are interesting and evocative, a lot of input from sources, description and writer insight. These stories are more like literature than news, but are still about real-world places/things/people, and based in fact.

For examples of these kinds of in-depth stories, see the website for the Pulitzer Prizes, the best of the best of American journalistic nonfiction writing. The website is an incredibly rich resource for writers, and worth spending time perusing.

The Pulitzers are awarded annually in (now) 14 categories of writing, cartooning and photography, plus six categories of fiction, drama, music and literature. Hungarian-born newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer created the prizes (and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, one of the nation’s very best) in his will to promote and reward excellence in journalism. Click here for that history. The first Pulitzer Prizes were awarded in 1917. This year’s awards will be announced, as usual, in New York in April.

(Professor Pease was honored to serve as a Pulitzer Prize juror—rare for an academic—in 1998-1999, and wrote a column about it.)

For our final feature/profile story, it might be worthwhile looking at what the Pulitzer juries have thought were the best of American journalism. Click here Gene Weingarten of The Washington Post, the best feature story of 2008. Also browse the feature category on the Pulitzer site to see what kinds of things have been considered the best of our craft (just click on the year, listed across the top of the page, for all the categories, and navigate to that year’s winners).

To get “depth,” the writer needs to get inside her/his topic, understand—know—everything about the subject and what makes it tick. A lot of detail is required: sources, interviews, observation and description.

For this assignment, students may elect either a feature story on a thing—a place (the milk line at the Gossner’s Cheese factory, the counter at Angie’s restaurant, the Beaver Mountain lift...), an event (the annual Girl Scout Jamboree, the weekly demolition derby, this weekend's man/dog 5k fun run...) or an organization (the people of the Utah Save The Whale or Great Old Broads group...). The goal is not just to write about the topic, but to show the reader its essence, some basic truth and reality about it. You must transport the reader to your topic, help her see and hear and smell it, paint a word-picture that will make the thing real for a reader.

Alternatively, for this assignment you can write a personality profile on an individual, focusing on everything there is to know about a person, internal and external. For a profile, the reporter (obviously) interviews the individual—multiple times, if possible. You spend time with your subject, watching him/her work, interact with the world and other people, do his thing and, in the process, reveal essential truths about who he or she is. In addition to interviewing the subject, you also will seek out everything you can about your person—interview friends and enemies, co-workers, family, examine the physical environment in which the person lives and works for what it can tell you about your subject, read her/his writings, study his/her artwork, listen to his/her music...whatever. The goal is to paint a fully rounded word-picture that tells the reader some essence, central truths about your subject: Who she really is, what makes her tick, her strengths, weaknesses, fears, hopes, dreams. Some examples: Brent the Bicycle Guy, the owner of the greasy-spoon restaurant, the mailman, a fishing/hunting guide, a yoga instructor, a college professor.

The Issue Story

The other major assignment is an issue story. These are stories that take a large, macro, global MONSTER topic (a disease, a social issue like teen pregnancy) and discussed its implications and presence on a local, micro level. For example, the government has just released a major study of (pick a topic: immigration); what does this mean here in Cache Valley? You’ll have reports on the initial macro study, will find state of Utah stats that relate, local county data, and find individuals—people, programs, agencies—to focus on and to provide a human face for your issue.

When I was working for the Associated Press in Arkansas about a bazillion years ago, a New York-based organization called the Guttenmacher Institute released its annual report on teen pregnancy. The report included national and state-by-state stats; in Arkansas, 22 percent of all babies born statewide had been to mothers younger than 17. The story I wrote included the macro info on the national and state situation re. teen pregnancy, but it focused on a 17-year-old mother (of four!!!), and doctors and nurses who work with teenaged mothers. The story took its headline from a doctor’s quote, about “Babies Having Babies.”

Not surprisingly, the Pulitzer Prizes reserve their top award for stories that deal with these kinds of global issues and that put a human face on the issue. The 2008 Pulitzer Award for Public Service—the top award—went to a team at the Washington Post headed by Dana Priest, that examined awful conditions for returning Iraq war soldiers at Walter Reed Hospital, the nation’s premier veterans medical facility. If you read just the first few paragraphs of the team’s opening story—the first of 10—you will see that the approach is to focus at the micro level (a wounded soldier and his substandard room), building into some quotes to help the reader “see” the story, and then a couple of grafs that serve as nut grafs to tell the reader the scope and “So what?” of the series.

Of COURSE I expect Pulitzer-caliber work of you for these two final stories! Lacking that, I expect at least that you will have thought long and carefully about both your feature/profile, and what about your subject will really engage your reader; and about your issue—something important, that affects people’s lives, and presented in a way that portrays real people whose lives are affected by your topic.

Please pitch me your feature/profile and issue story topics in person or via email. What do you want to do? What's the answer to the reader’s “So What?” question? Whom will you interview? and why them? How will you get to the central core of the story—do you even know what it is???

Questions?