NEWS FEATURES: "Bringing you the news behind the news..."

Notes by Chris Horrie

These are longer "wrap up articles" printed on or around the news pages of a newspaper or during a scheduled news bulletin to fill out the details left out of a fast breaking news story.

News features are the main feature format used in news bulletins and outside the designated "features" sections of newspapers and magazines.

Style is similar to normal news writing, but may have a multi-point "washing line" introduction instead of simple summary WHO-WHERE-WHAT-WHEN introduction.

Normally written by the news-desk. Often have a heavy emphasis on graphics.

Examples can be found in any national newspaper. Also BBC News Online; Sunday Times News Review section; Time magazine; Newsweek magazine; The Economist; The Spectator; The New Statesman. Trade press – any major B2B title. Consumer press, not so much. They tend to be too far off the news agenda (partic. Monthlies).

Writing depends heavily on access to "press clippings" - the archive of articles previously published on the subject.

The classic example would be a train crash. The crash is the news, but the news feature would be a "wrap up" of all train crashes in the recent (and maybe distant) past to give the reader a full briefing.

The approach is the same on radio and TV where the anchor will introduce "our transport correspondent Sid X..." to do the wrap up, perhaps with archive sound or pictures.

The TV equivalent to the newspaper "news feature" is the 3 min "package" mini-feature on the Today programme; on Newsnight (they love them) or on Channel Four news. If the package/mini-feature is related to the news we say it is "pegged" to the news. Almost all news features have to be pegged in some way. But this can be tangential - eg a big thing on Global Warming to mark the official arrival of winter; or something about rising transfer fees for footballers to mark the start of a new football season, etc, etc. 

Because of the reliance on press clippings, these types of features are often known as "clippings jobs".  The method is essentially to assemble all the press clips and write up an account. Probably there will be a similar "clipping job" from last time the same sort of event happened. The job then is to put a new "top" on the story. When printed it too will go in the clipping library (or less likely, but possible, an electronic storage system for radio and TV output. Then when it happens again it will be dusted off and so on forever.

The best funded news organisations have MASSIVE clippings libraries (eg Press Association; Wapping; BBC) which makes this types of work quick and easy. At the BBC you can call up as many clips as you like on an electronic archive called NEON (try it, if and when you are on attachment there). You can't have access as a freelance. PA allows you to do it but charges around £50 an hour. But you name a subject or a person and you will get absolutely everything printed about the subject in every paper in tabloids and broadsheets going back for 50 years.

Getting press clippings ("the clips") for students to practice on used to be an absolute nightmare. But now you can use the fully searchable story archive at ELECTRONIC TELEGRAPH (put "electronic telegraph uk" in Google. You need to register the first time you use it)  and also search the archive at BBC NEWS ONLINE. Both go back to the mid-90s and provide all you need to practice writing news "backgrounder" features while you are a student.

A very effective online press clipings service called InfoLinx is available through the Unviersity of Westminster library website.

Writing/presenting style for this type of feature is basically secondary to understanding the format. You can study the style by looking at or listening to the dozens of news features and following suit.

A typical example, if we need to discuss one, can be found here. A news feature written by CH for BBC news online, filling out the news that the US had named Osma Bin Laden as the world's most wanted man, and assessing where he might be hiding. It is nothing special - just a typical example of a news feature. Note the importance of "graphic journalism" - a feature of all news feature writing.

Even classier would be the the classic is the Sunday Times black-ink; numbered boxes of a plane crash, etc, done as a cartoon strip. You can see these every week in the Sunday Times news review section. Part of your job when writing or "packaging" a news feature is briefing picture researchers and graphics people. A news feature without pictures is not much good to anyone, now we are in a mainly visual TV-led news environment.

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