Day: September 6, 2025

When government funding expires without an approved full-year spending bill or a CR, programs and activities are shut down for weeks or months. The effects are far-reaching and costly, with the Congressional Budget Office estimating that even a short shutdown costs billions in lost economic activity that will never be recovered.

Americans expect their federal government to help keep the economy running smoothly, provide public benefits, conduct scientific research, and address national security challenges. Yet the partisan divides over funding have created a high risk of a government shutdown that would halt essential services, delaying passport processing and small business loans and preventing food safety inspections.

A government shutdown erupts when Congress fails to pass a full-year funding bill or a continuing resolution, and the President vetoes the measure. Congress may try to override the presidential veto, but it will take the support of two-thirds of both chambers.

Shutdowns have been the result of a range of disagreements, including a dispute over the Affordable Care Act. Regardless of the cause, a shutdown can lead to long delays in getting Social Security and Medicare checks, closed parks and museums, and slowed court cases.

Each year, all agencies reevaluate and post contingency plans that detail how they will respond to a shutdown. These plans include details such as whether staff will continue to work on user-fee derived revenue and how many workers will be kept on the job. In the past, most of these plans have centered on keeping vital functions open and accessible to the public.

Feature stories are about the things that happen in our communities, that you would not expect to be newsworthy but which have an impact on people’s lives. They are often long, detailed articles which take up a great deal of space in a newspaper or magazine, so they need to be very well written. They also need to be interesting.

They can be about a person (profiles, celebrity pieces), a topic or an issue (such as the environment, crime, health, etc.), a location, a type of work or activity (artisanal craftwork, community development, tourism, etc.), a particular sport or pastime, something seasonal or even a lifestyle piece which covers areas such as food, fashion, home or leisure.

You can use all the skills you learned in hard news writing to create a good feature article. You can also include elements of narrative and storytelling, interviews, surveys and sensory details (like photographs and videos). But you must always ensure the content is king; there is less scope in a news feature than a hard news story to let your literary style show through.

A newspaper which only had features and no news stories would seem shallow, so they are a vital part of the mix. However, it is possible to overdo it with them; they should be balanced with plenty of hard news items. Breaking news is important and you should be quick to respond to it, but turning out a lot of features when nothing of any significance is happening can confuse people.