I’m preparing to teach a class this fall at the University of Mississippi’s School of Journalism. The course is designed to instruct how to produce feature stories and hard news stories for radio and podcasts. The textbook is Feature Writing and Reporting: Journalism in the Digital Age by Jennifer Brannock Cox, a professor at Salisbury University.
Although Dr. Cox’s book is geared towards feature writing for print, feature writing is feature writing, and her techniques are the same for audio. “Feature storytelling” and “feature journalism,” twin teachable terms from Cox, are now in my vernacular and I plan to use them in my motivational talks. To use as an example, I am going to produce a feature about East Miss. Community College’s radio station’s “All-70s Summer” and ask Wendy Wilde, the news director of WHO Radio in Des Moines, to voice the narration.
The chapter Concepts for Practicing Feature Storytelling discusses six news values, attributes that determine whether a journalist should bother with a story, how much time and length to give it, and where it should be placed inside the newscast. Cox says that six questions should be asked about the potential news story. See if you can identify each one-word news value.
.1. How much does this story matter to our readers or listeners? How many people might be affected by it? (Term begins with the letter i.)
.2. Did it happen recently? Is there a particular day/month when this story might be more relevant to our readers/listeners? (Term begins with the letter t.)
.3. Did the news event occur within our proclaimed coverage area? Is this a larger issue that can be localized to our readers/listeners? (Term begins with the letter p.)
.4. Does the story involve people or organizations most readers/listeners would know or those who make decisions affecting our readers/listeners? (Term begins with a p.)
.5. Is this an unusual occurrence that would pique our readers’/listeners’ interest? Is it something that has never happened or has happened only rarely? (Two synonymous terms beginning with o and n.) 6. Does the story involve two or more parties disagreeing? Will our listeners/readers want to weigh in on this issue with their opinions?
ANSWERS:
impact; timeliness; proximity; prominence; oddity or novelty; conflict.
Editor’s Note: Don Rodney Vaughan, Ph.D., teaches journalism, interpersonal communication and public speaking at East Mississippi Community College and is the pastor of Mt. Vernon Baptist Church in Webster County. Contact him at dvaughan@eastms.edu.
