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.