Great Features: A Checklist

@BetseyGuzior

Former president,

Society for Features Journalism

Where are we headed today You’ll learn how to: • To hone a story idea into a

package that works for your readers.

• To extend your package into the digital space – easily.

• To discover new ways to tell the same old stories.

• To keep the story alive with reader interaction. Photo by Flickr user Barn Images

With lots of ideas to steal from…

http://featuresjournalism.org/ https://www.facebook.com/SocietyForFeaturesJournalism/

And good ideas from you!

For something totally different, one of our senior editors wrote a four-part, historical, murder-mystery fiction whose protagonist was really the first black cop in Kansas City. It was set in 1904, and he worked in real details about places, but made up all the characters and incidents.

-- The Kansas City Star

‘Murder in the West Bottom’

True Blue app With Royals mania in full swing and our full-base coverage, we launched an app that gathers all our Royals coverage in one place, with some extras like schedules and players stats. It's been really popular, and drives most of the traffic to our Royals stories. If there's some obsession in your town that you cover the heck out of, consider an app to aggregate your content.

-- The Kansas City Star

‘Command and Control’ video David Guzman's work on the video for Alan Peppard's “Command and Control” story is a fantastic example of visual storytelling. David seamlessly edited together iconic images, audio and video from the day Reagan was shot to eloquently complement the traditional story form. The video clips of Alexander Haig, which David precisely synced up with audio from a separate source, were especially impressive.

-- The Dallas Morning News

The video Full interactive YouTube preview

Does it have a sense of place?

Can you get this anywhere else?

Does this help tell the story of a community?

Classic Hollywood

If you have someone on your staff or a local freelancer who is immersed in old (or older) Hollywood, do not let them out of your sight. In a city that reveres everyone under 18, we have scored enormous traffic with articles and a Facebook page that focus on “classic Hollywood.” Here’s a piece on “The Sound of Music” (at age 50), a movie that kicked off a local film festival.

-- Los Angeles Times

14 great places to snap a selfie

Guide and GuideLive.com staffers rounded up their 14 favorite places in Dallas-Fort Worth to take selfies and took selfies of themselves. Easy art. They added five tips for taking good selfies and launched a selfie photo contest on facebook.com/dmnguidelive. The winner won a vacation package at the Gaylord Texan.

-- The Dallas Morning News

Water-saving tips We’re dry as a bone in Southern California, and we turned to the Natural Resources Defense Council for a free list of ways to save water. They gave us 43 tips, which made for a full-page story.

-- Los Angeles Times

Does this fit into your major narrative(s)?

Take time to define the 3-5 subjects you will “own” for your readers.

‘Culture shop’ As the Baltimore area becomes more demographically diverse, we’re seeing more groceries and markets popping up that represent regions and cuisines. The Sun launched the “Culture shop” series to help readers explore the new markets and discover recipes to take advantage of the offerings.

-- The Baltimore Sun

Love at first listen

August is a quiet time on the local arts scene, so it helps to have some evergreen stories. This story surveyed local classical musicians about the compositions that first prompted them to pick up their instruments.

-- The Baltimore Sun

Stories to tell

In advance of the opening of a renovated wing at the Baltimore Museum of Art, we had the curator tell us the stories of particular works that had rarely or never been shown before at the museum. They fit in categories such as “quirkiest” and “recent acquisition.” It was an accessible and fun way to bring readers into this new space.

-- The Baltimore Sun

11 summer books picked by 11 New Orleans authors Who better to tell readers what books to pack for their summer trips than beloved local authors? The authors love the attention. Readers devoured this post, sharing it on Facebook and commenting under the post itself.

-- The Times-Picayune

http://bit.ly/nolabooks

How does this story need to be told?

Break out of the story/headline/photo box, especially

for online.

Easy TV galleries

Newsday has two very simple ongoing features that have generated literally MILLIONS of page views this year. Each is displayed as a photo list with a short copy block for easy browsing. Once initially created, the list is a cinch to update and maintain.

-- Contact: Shawna VanNess, svanness@newsday.com

Newsday

Best TV series to binge-watch New movies available via Netflix

How much are crawfish? Steal a story form from another beat: In New Orleans, crawfish has a short, sweet season, so dining writer Todd A. Price decided to treat the mudbugs like the precious commodity they are. He reported on them as a business writer might stock prices. Each week, he tracked the price of boiled crawfish at critic Brett Anderson's 10 favorite spots to get mudbugs. The posts included a graphic, showing the prices over the course of the season and links to our top spots, with prices. Readers loved it. They commented on the posts and shared them on social media.

-- The Times-Picayune

Doggone unique When a reporter set out to do the usual "beyond flowers and chocolates for Valentine's" story, she discovered a local pug rescue organization was offering Valentine's “pug-o-gram” delivery, where a pug or two -- dressed to the nines -- would personally deliver gifts to recipients. We had to bring the dogs into the studio for a photo shoot. A behind-the-scenes video of the pug shoot did really well for us online and through social media -- and the rescue group sold more “pug-o-grams” than they could keep up with!

-- Fort Worth Star-Telegram

‘50 Shades of Hay’

As a way to bridge Valentine's Day and the opening of "Fifty Shades of Gray," we invited readers to write chapters for a Midwest-centric fan fiction called, "Fifty Shades of Hay." Totally silly, lots of fun.

-- The Kansas City Star

Video series: ‘In Judy's Kitchen’ Food editor Judy Walker has a long-running series of how-to features that takes readers into her kitchen where she explains how to cook. Recently, we decided to do a series on how to make Louisiana Classics. The theme breathed new life into the cooking series, which runs online and in the Wednesday food section. Any town could do this with a series of how-to’s on making the dishes your town is known for.

-- The Times-Picayune

Dorm room do-overs As a twist on the annual dorm room decor story, we asked four TCU seniors majoring in interior design to suggest how they would decorate and furnish a freshman dorm room. First, they created 3-D "CAD" renderings of their dream rooms. Then, they picked out furnishings from stores and websites that readers could get, too. The results were the cutest, most unique, most practical dorm rooms we'd ever seen. Visually, the CAD renderings were a great alternative to having to set up and shoot actual dorm rooms.

-- Fort Worth Star-Telegram

What digital tools will you need?

Harness the online power of alternative storytelling by using

digital tools

‘South Florida Beach Guide’ Our “South Florida Beach Guide” started as a digital project that was repurposed back to print. Our goal was to create a guide with strong SEO that could live online. Marian Liu built the guide using Storymap and embedded it into an HTML page to get the traffic and to include ad units.

We sent five reporters – and one editor who loves to surf -- out to profile about 25 beaches in three counties. We included information about lifeguards , bathrooms and parking.

-- South Florida Sun-Sentinel

How are you going to share this story?

Use social networks to bring the story to readers who care about it.

The Alyssa Milano effect

How can readers help you tell the story?

You can get them involved before the story publishes, or after, and extend

the life of it

Mother knows best

Magazine Editor Kevin Kirkland compiles a column weekly that spotlights 100-year-old people in Pittsburgh. As a different way of marking Mother's Day, he interviewed four mothers aged 100 to 106 who talked about their experiences/views on motherhood.

-- Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Mother knows best

Last Christmas tree We asked a reporter to write an original holiday story about love and hope, and he came up with “The Last Christmas Tree on the Lot.” It tells what happens when a lonely boy, a despondent man and a forlorn evergreen unwrap the magic of the Christmas season. We asked readers to download and decorate the image of the last tree on the lot. We received 20 images, and the story was shared. Tip: Get this out before school lets out so that teachers will get involved!

-- The Times-Picayune

The Last Christmas Tree

‘The Pets Issue’ The 16 pages of content included many lists (popular names, pet services, exotic pets, pet statistics) and stories on the most popular pets on social media, rescue groups, pit bills, cat videos, places to dine with your dog, chefs who cook for their dogs, pet furniture, pet clothing, new veterinary treatments, Petiquette and therapy animals. Exhausting. Kind of glorious. Will never do it again. Except for maybe next year.

-- Los Angeles Times

‘Gray Matters’ One of our brainier newsroom staffers was asked to gather essays from strong writers around the city who don’t work for the Chronicle. We wanted to create an online literary salon of sorts and provide value-added content to our premium website, houstonchronicle.com. That staffer’s name is Lisa Gray and she called her project, “Gray Matters.” This site (houstonchronicle.com/graymatters) has become very popular with people who love to read things that are interesting and don’t necessarily care whether they have any connection to news. This project has widened the pool of writers we use – and no, they don’t get paid.

-- Houston Chronicle

Can you recycle this?

Online, a story can be an evergreen that adds to your page views. You can

also repurpose a story.

DIY crafting feature

We were looking for a new, local column , but we weren’t budgeted for that. So, I contacted several local DIY/craft bloggers and asked if they would be willing to have me scrape their sites for projects and let us use them in the paper. Several said yes, and now I have a regular rotation. We always give them credit and refer folks to their blogs. It’s free; they basically do all the work, and I have local content on P2 of our Thursday section.

-- San Antonio Express-News

“12 Months, 12 Hikes, One Trail” When we found out a local naturalist was leading hikers on a tour of the same local trail once a month for 12 months, we decided to tag along. The purpose is to show the many changes – some big, some small – that the landscape, plant life and animal life undergo over the course of a year. This is the April installment of what we call, “12 Months, 12 Hikes, One Trail.” The stories are written essay-style with lots of creative details, and the photos have been lovely. We have a special topics page online with photo galleries.

-- The Roanoke Times

Must-take day trips This multimedia slideshow of day trips from New Orleans drew more than 100,000 readers, and more keep coming. It will run later in the Travel section in print. The best thing is: It is evergreen information that we can update annually and keep fresh for readers.

-- The Times-Picayune

25 must-take day trips from New Orleans