JOURNALISM 3310: Feature Writing
Spring 2017
Course: JOURN 3310-002
Date and Time: Tuesday and Thursday 9:30 a.m. to 10:50 a.m.Room GAB 114
INSTRUCTOR
George Getschow Cell phone 972-746-1633
Home phone 817-491-2923
Office Hours
My office is next to Dean Bland’s office on the ground floor of the GAB building. My name is on a plaque next to my door, along with other people who occupy the corner office. Please schedule an appointment if you want to see me. My office hours are Monday and Wednesday between 10 a.m. and 11:00a.m. and between 12:30 and 1:30 p.m.I will also make myself available at other times by appointment.
Teaching Tenet
“Then said a teacher, speak to us of Teaching. And he said: No man can reveal to you anything but that which already lies half asleep in the dawning of your knowledge. The teacher who walks in the shadow of the temple, among his followers, gives not of his wisdom but rather leads you to the threshold of your own mind.”
--The Prophet, p. 56
Required Texts
Blundell, William E. The Art and Craft of Feature Writing, New York, Plume 1988.
Sides, Hampton. Americana , Anchor, 2004
Ken Wells, Michael Lewis, Floating Off The Page:The Best Stories from The Wall Street Journal. Simon & Schuster. New York. 2002
Other Materials
-AP Stylebook
-Separate notebooks for lectures, interviews and research.
-Digital tape recorders and video devices are recommended for your audio and visual work.
-A hardcover personal journal is recommended for those who aspire to become lifetime storytellers.
Course Description
Journalism 3310 is all about storytelling. And storytelling is all about “how to catch and hold a reader’s interest through artful narration of factual material,” as Bill Blundell likes to put it. Bill was the finest feature editor I ever worked with in my 16 years at The Wall Street Journal. He spent several years at the Journal working as the paper’s “writing coach,” traveling to bureaus in the U.S. and overseas giving lectures on storytelling approaches and techniques. Out of this road show came a manual: Storytelling Step by Step: A Guide to Better Feature Writing. It provided a number of guiding principles that apply whether one is writing a bread-and-butter mainstream business story or a whimsical, offbeat “A-hed” that runs in the center column of the front page of the paper each day. Over the years, most Journal reporters and editors have followed these guiding principles in preparing every Journal feature. They include: careful planning to make sure the story idea is well conceived, that the story structure is sound, that the themes are clear, and most of all, that the subject is interesting.
I was tutored in the Blundell style of feature writing, and many newspapers have adopted this style of writing. It calls for in-depth research, lively leads, rich anecdotes, pungent quotes, vivid scenes and characters that come alive on the page. But there are a myriad number of approaches to structuring a short or long-form feature, with flair and imagination. The Dallas Morning News, The Denton Record Chronicle, The Dallas Observer, Texas Monthly, The New Yorker, the Atlantic, Rolling Stone, D Magaine, Outside, Time, Harpers, Vogue, Vanity Fair, the Dallas Observer and a variety of digital publications have their own style of storytelling.
We will examine stories from some of these publications to learn about storytelling techniques. We will read and dissect the A-heds in Floating Off the Page, a compendium of the odd and offbeat stories that run on the front page of The Wall Street Journal each day. But the main text of this course is The Art and Craft of Feature Writing, because in my mind, it provides the best step-by-step guide for unearthing the mystery of reporting and writing features through a clear, step-by-step process. What sets it apart from other books of its ilk is that it considers reporting and writing as an interrelated process, which it is. And whether you’re writing for a newspaper, a magazine or an on-line publication, the same craft elements apply.
Course Requirements
Your first assignment, which we will discuss the first day of class, is for The Denton Record-Chronicle. We will be working with Scott Parks, the paper’s managing editor,to develop in-depth profiles of a disappearing breed of workers in Denton County: farmers, ranchers, cowboys and ranch hands.
Denton County was formed by a Texas land grant in 1846, and for the next 150 years the county the county was shaped and defined by its rural heritage. But today, Denton County’s rural roots are being plowed under by housing developments, shopping centers, restaurants and commercial businesses. Thousands of farms and ranches are for sale. In short, the county’s farm and ranching communities have been decimated by rampant development.
What are the implications of this rapid change? As the rural culture and economy of Denton County is continually transformed by development, how are the farmers, ranchers and ranch hands who remain coping with change? Their way of life –growing crops, raising horses, competing in rodeos and 4-H clubs -- is disappearing. What’s the deepest meaning of this loss for farming and ranching families who have devoted their lives to living off the land?
To find out, we will interview a wide swath of farmers, ranchers, ranch hands, and their children who are still making a living off the land. Taken together, I believe the mosaic of many of these characters will prove surprising and delightful -- the stuff of good storytelling.
My feature writing classes have collaborated with the Denton Record-Chronicle on a number of feature writing projects over the last decade. Last semester, my feature writing classes did a series of profiles on blue-collar workers titled “Working Stiffs.” The profiles explored the lives of day laborers, janitors, Smoothie King workers, bus drivers and many other blue-collar workers. Each story was accompanied by an Editor’s Note from Scott Parks. Here’s what the note said.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Politicians have waged a fierce debate to win over working-class voters. Income inequality has become a major issue. With that in mind, the Denton Record-Chronicle and the University of North Texas Mayborn School of Journalism teamed up to explore the lives of blue-collar workers in Denton County. The stories in this series, which begins today, were written by UNT journalism students under the direction of professor George Getschow.
This semester, Scott hopes my class will come up with an equally engaging series of stories from rural Denton County. Scott told me that the diversity of the subjects will be important to avoid telling the same story over and over in the DRC.
In previous classes,students were required to produce four features – two in-depth features for the Denton Record-Chronicle, an A-hed and personal essay. Butbecause feature writing is an entirely new form of storytelling for many of you, I’m reducing the class requirements to three features – an in-depth profile of someone working in agriculture or ranching, an A-hed and a personal essay.
In preparing your feature profile for The Denton Record-Chronicle, you will also be responsible formulti-media such as recorded interviews, photos and videos of your subjects. You can earn extra credit for producing outstanding audio, video and photos to accompany your profile. This additional multi-media request is to prepare you for a future in the journalism/public relations field. All future jobs require this multi-dimensional approach to the art of storytelling.
You’re required to complete your in-depth profile within the first 8 weeks of class. That sounds like a lot of time, but in between you’ll be expected to turn in proposals and drafts that will be edited and workshopped. Scott Parks and I also need time to edit the features and prepare them for publication in the paper.
Writing a Proposal
Coming up with compelling profile idea is critical to the success of any feature. Starting today, begin the task of doing preliminary research and interviews to write a compelling story proposal that we will submit to Scott Parks for approval. The proposal should spell out what makes your character compelling, why we should care about this character, the people you intend to interview to put the character in the context of his or her larger world. That would include your characters’ co-workers, their bosses, their spouses and children, their friends, et cetera. Your proposal should make clear to Scott that not only have you come up with a compellingsubject, but have also come up with a solid planto develop your in-depth profile. I will give you some models of what I want your proposal to look like.
Writing a proposal is a crucial step in developing a feature story because it forces the writer to boil the story down to its basic dimensions – what’s this feature about, why should we care, and to demonstrate that you have a plan for executing the feature in time to meet the deadline. Every Wall Street Journal reporter is required to submit a well-crafted proposal or “pitch” to the Page One Editor. The same process works at most magazines. The editor determines whether the story is worthy of publication based on the quality of the proposal.
Once your proposal is approved by Scott and I, you will have about 2 weeks to complete the first draft of your profile. The first draft of your feature will be evaluated and critiqued by me. We may also have a class workshop to critique your profiles. Both from me and the workshop, you should come away with specific, concrete suggestions on how to improve your draft. You will then have another week or two to revise your profile, whereupon your feature will be critiqued again by me and perhaps a class workshop. We will repeat this process up until the deadline, when you will be required to turn in your final profile that will be edited, graded and, if it’s exceptional work, will be dispatched to Scott for publication.
Writing your in-depth profile for the Denton Record Chronicle will take about eight weeks. But during this period I also be spending some time in class teaching you about the process of writing an Ahed, or “bright,” and freelancing this feature for a specific audience. An A-hed or “bright,” is a short, lively feature story similar to those running on the front page of TheWall Street Journal. I willalso be teaching youthe art and craft of writing a personal essay – another form of feature writing that’s appearing more and more frequently in the nation’s newspapers. The personal essay will be your final assignment.
The goal of this class is to make you a better feature writer than you are today. To that end,I will be recommending a number of well-crafted features for you to read, analyze and study.This is a critical daily ritual for anyone who seeks to become a better writer.
To become a better feature writer, I encourage you to read the following blogs and websites that focus on storytelling:
--Mayborn Magazine, which showcases writers who speak at Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference, a gathering of storytellers committed to the craft of narrative nonfiction.
-- especially recommended; a website created by young writers who came to the conclusion that good feature writing might just save the newspaper business.
-- indispensable site for the journalist, print or electronic, and public relations professional.
-- This site will keep you up on current thinking about features.
Other Sites:
Grading:
The in-depth profile will account for one-third of your grade. The A-hed will account for another third of your grade and your personal essay will account for one-third of your grade. Each story will be evaluated based on the quality of the writing and the quality of the reporting. A good editor can immediately detect when stories are thin or underreported. Since your profile will be published in the Denton Record-Chronicle and you’re A-hed and personal essay will be freelanced to major newspapers and magazines, they must meet the highest standards of journalism. No newspaper, including the Denton Record-Chronicle, is obliged to publish your features just because you’ve written them for a class. You will be competing against staff writers and other freelance writers for space. It’s the stories that are well researched and well written that get published.
Deadlines: Missing deadlines is verboten in publishing. You will be expected to bring your best-effort drafts to me and or the workshop and turn in your finished features when due. Don’t wait until the last minute before class to print out your drafts and make copies for the workshop. Inevitably, you will encounter problems. Do your printing and copying long before the start of the workshop. If you bring shoddy drafts or no drafts at all to the workshop, this will adversely affect your grade.
If you’re wavering between, say, a “B” and an “A,” the quality of your audio, photos and video work will help me decide your grade on the profile.
Attendance:
You can not afford to miss this class, especially since some of you will be attending this class just once a week. If you’re not attending class and the workshops, you will not be able to learn and absorb the storytelling techniques that I’ll be teaching in this class. Consequently, attendance at both lectures and workshops is mandatory. If you miss more than two classes during the semester without a doctor’s excuse or my permission, your grade will automatically be reduced from say an “A” to a “B” or from a “B” to a “C.” This is how important I consider attendance.
Dropping Course
Students who wish to drop the course before the census date (12th class day during long semesters) may do so without permission; they may do so online by visiting my.unt.edu orin person at the Registrar’s Office (in the Eagle Student Services Building). After the 12th classday (or the equivalent class day for short semesters), students must first receive written approval of the instructor prior to dropping the course.
A grade of W (withdrawal) will be recorded if you drop the course during the automatic W period. After that time, the student must have a passing grade in order to receive a grade of W for the dropped course; otherwise, the grade will be WF (withdrawal/fail).
Internet Research:
The Internet is a good place to start your research, but only to find sources. Sites such as Lexis Nexis archive a huge collection of articles that can be a good starting point in the research. Lexis Nexis can be accessed through the UNT Library Web site under Electronic Resources.
Web sites may not be used as primary source material.
Email interviews are also discouraged. If a source will only grant an interview through email, I suggest finding another source. If you feel that source is crucial to the story, discuss the problem with me or your TA.
Tentative Course Schedule (Chapter numbers refer to the textbook):
Classes of this nature are not set in stone. If we need an extra lecture or two to more thoroughly cover an important topic or to provide the time for a guest speaker, I reserve the right to do so. For the most part, however, I will adhere to the following schedule and I expect you to read the scheduled chapter before you come to class.
Week 1: Introduction/Overview of Why Storytelling is Important
Read Chapter 1 and 2: “Raw Material and Shaping Ideas”
Getting Focused
Lecture getting focused and writing a pitch
Week 2: Crafting a Story Proposal
Read Story Proposals and Critique Them
The Art of Characterization
Lecture: How to animate characters on the page
Week 3: Planning and Execution
Read Chapter 4 “Planning and Execution”
Read Chapter 5 “Organization”
Week 4: Interviewing Techniques for Feature Stories
Lecture: Interviewing Techniques
Week 5: Handling Numbers and other Key Storytelling Elements
Read Chapter 6: “Handling Key Story Elements”
Lecture: writing leads, “nut graphs” and story structure
Workshop Second Drafts
Week 6: Wordcraft
Lecture: Pacing, Progression, Descriptiveness, Specificity and Imagic Exactness
Week 7: The Art of Dialogue in Storytelling
Lecture: How and When To Use Quotes vs Dialogue
Workshop First Draft, Second Feature
Week 8: Floating Off the Page, The Art of the A-hed
Lecture: Writing light, whimsical, offbeat features is tougher than you think
Read assigned stories in “Floating Off The Page” and Develop Story Proposal
Week 9: A-hed proposals