Features are not meant to deliver the news firsthand. They do contain elements of news, but their main function is to humanize, to add colour, to educate, to entertain, to illuminate. They often recap major news that was reported in a previous news cycle.
Features often:
* Profile people who make the news
* Explain events that move or shape the news
* Analyze what is happening in the world, nation or community
* Teach an audience how to do something
* Suggest better ways to live
* Examine trends
* Entertain.
Source: http://www.mala.bc.ca/~soules/media301/feature.htm
According to Jon Franklin, twice a Pulitzer winner, feature stories offer news of the emotions is the way. What, then, does a real feature story look like? Consider these as possible characteristics:
- You can read it, if you want to, in a single sitting on the day the story was published.
- You can read a short one in five minutes and a long one in 15 minutes.
- It is NOT a news story but can be inspired by the news.
- It has, at its heart, human interest.
- It illuminates lives lived in our time.
- It takes advantage of an expanded set of language and narrative strategies.
- It can be written and reported within the normal timeframe of journalistic enterprise.
Source: http://www.poynter.org/content/content_view.asp?id=67829
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