Writing Fabulous Features

Finding feature ideas seems to be the most challenging job for most of my students. Every semester, they come back from their first pursuit of a story and tell me there is nothing to write about.

The truth is everything looks ordinary unless you see it through fresh eyes and think it extraordinary. Story ideas are truly on every corner, in virtually every person you meet, in your own interests and experiences.

So where should you start looking for story ideas?

1. Listen to what people are talking about about. Keep your ears open at work, parties, the park and the supermarket. Check out social media. The people you know are filled with story ideas.
2. What interests you or what experiences have you
   had? Many publications do not share the same conflict-of-interest issues as a newspaper, so your own life experiences can make good story fodder.
3. What is happening in the news or in research?
   Sexual assaults on college campuses, or the challenges related to student loans are two big national stories that could be tailored to a specific genre of publication — finance, parenting, etc.
4. Who have you met? When you meet someone new and ask about what they do, really listen to the answers. You never know when someone might make a great profile.

“Ideas come from every aspect of my life,” Mike Wagner of The Dispatch said. “My personal life, in my job at the paper, reading other newspapers, having conversations with people at fundraisers where my wife works. Going to a football game and seeing people having little ceremonies over the bricks at Ohio Stadium that led to a 4,000-word feature story about what those bricks represent. We wrote those stories about the people behind those bricks. There are like 10,000 of them that people buy around the stadium up there.”

Wagner said he has covered everything from jump-rope competitions to princess parties, to a humanitarian who dedicated his life to helping poor people grow gardens and food on the west side of Columbus, which required a call to his widow two days after his death.

He also has profiled former heavyweight boxing champion Buster Douglas, who now works teaching boxing at Columbus Recreation and Parks, and one-time Ohio State quarterback Art Schlichter, who has been imprisoned multiple times after gambling derailed his life.

Where do those ideas come from?

“I made a list of people that I thought were interesting people in Columbus that we haven’t really done anything in-depth on,” he said. “Sometimes these stories take years to get, sometimes they take days and sometimes they take months. I started writing Art Schlichter in prison when I was a reporter in Dayton. I was actually at the Blue Jackets [NHL] game where a little girl was hit in the head with a puck and eight years later I contacted the family on the anniversary and Espen Knutsen, the guy who struck the puck, and it led to one of the most powerful feature stories I ever did. Then six months later it led to a reunion between the player and the family. So that was just born out of something that I was involved in personally.”