Feature-style stories outperform traditional news stories in readership, satisfaction and image.

That’s according to “The Impact Study of Newspaper Readership” (PDF).

It was sponsored by the Newspaper Association of America and the American Society of Newspaper Editors. For this study, researchers:

• Analyzed a representative sample of 100 newspapers from across the country
• Asked 37,000 readers 450 questions about their reactions to their newspaper
• Conducted a content analysis of 47,500 stories from the newspapers

The result: In “one of the most thought-provoking discoveries” of the study, researchers found that feature-style stories outperformed traditional news stories in readership, satisfaction and image.

What’s a feature-style story?

The Impact researchers make a strong distinction between feature stories and feature-style stories. If your chief technology officer has a huge collection of Disney figurines, and you decide to take a photo of him surrounded by plastic princesses for an intranet profile, that’s a feature story. Not a feature-style story.

But when you cover hard business, environmental, political, economic, scientific and other serious topics in the feature-style story structure, that’s a feature-style story. Feature-style writing, according to the researchers, is:

• More narrative, with a beginning, middle and end
• Often illustrates points through characters or anecdotes
• Likely to use more colorful language and a more playful writing style 

“A concern editors commonly express is that feature-style writing means ‘softening’ or ‘dumbing down’ the news,” said the researchers. “‘Feature-style’ is not a euphemism or proxy for ‘soft news.’ Writers can use feature-style writing to cover hard news stories without compromising the stories’ informational value or focus. We’re not describing a story type but a writing style.”

Feature-style stories, according to Impact:

1. Increase readership

Feature-style stories seem easier to read than the traditional inverted-pyramid news structure. (In this study, easy to read includes is relaxing to read and makes it easy to find what I’m looking for.) Making a message easy to read is one of the best ways to increase readership, the study found. That is, according to the study, the higher the score on easy to read, the more likely people are to:

• Read an information source more often
• Read it more completely
• Spend more time reading it

“Considering that only 5% of all politics stories are written in feature-style,” researchers wrote, “even one additional feature-style politics story per week would make a difference.”

What kind of difference could you make by adding features to your communications?

2. Increase satisfaction

The feature-style story structure boosts satisfaction in stories on topics including politics, sports, science and health. Newspapers with more feature-style political stories, for example, have readers who express higher satisfaction with their political coverage. Yet only 5% of all political stories are written in the feature style, according to the study.

Are you missing opportunities to boost your readers’ satisfaction with your messages?

3. Improve brand perception

Organizations that run more feature-style stories are seen as more:

• Fun
• Honest
• Intelligent
• Personable
• Neighborly
• In the know
• Thought provoking
• In touch with the values of readers

“There is strong evidence that an increase in the [number] of feature-style stories has wide-ranging benefits,” write the researchers. “It’s the [organizations] that incorporate feature-style writing in a broad range of topics that see the most benefit in brand perception.” That’s a pretty big impact.

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Source: “The Power to Grow Readership: Research from the Impact Study of Newspaper Readership,” the Newspaper Association of America and the American Society of Newspaper Editors, April 2001

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If I told you there was a communication tool that reduces readership, diminishes understanding and causes engagement to take a nosedive, would you use it?

Friends, there is such a tool, and you are using it every day. It’s called the inverted pyramid.

That’s what researchers learned in the  “Ways With Words” (PDF) study, a collaboration of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, The Poynter Institute for Media Studies, the St. Petersburg Times and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

For the study, St. Petersburg Times beat reporters covered their regular beats, writing four versions of each story:

• Inverted pyramid, the traditional news structure
• Narrative, or storytelling with a beginning, middle and end
• Opinion piece, offering a visible point of view
• Radical clarity, where the reporter explains everything that might possibly be explained. So if you mention dog, for instance, you might add “a four-legged canine domesticated for human companionship.”

Then, in phone interviews, researchers asked subscribers:

• How much of the story they read
• Whether they followed the jump
• What they understood, using true-or-false questions
• How fair and balancedthe story was
• Whether they cared about the subject — including whether the stories connected with their own experiences and made them want to find out more or get involved

The results?

The pyramid tanks

The inverted pyramid does “not work very well with readers,” researchers concluded.

Specifically, the inverted pyramid:

• Scored lowest in readership and getting the reader across the jump. The inverted pyramid starts out boring and “gets more boring as the reader reads down,” researchers said. Who needs to stick around for the rest of that?
• Scored lowest in understanding.“Journalists put background and context in the second half of the pyramid, so the reader who does not know that background cannot understand the top of the story,” researchers said. “As a result, only journalists and sources can fully understand inverted-pyramid stories.” Is that your audience?
• Made a mediocre showing in “involvement,”or whether the story made readers connect with and want to get involved in the topic. In our business, we call involvement “engagement.” Note that engagement and the inverted pyramid are mutually exclusive.

Why are we still using this thing?

The feature structure soars

The feature, or narrative, structure, on the other hand, tended to outperform the other structures in the study. Features scored highest of all of the formats in reading and getting readers across the jump. They also made a good showing in understanding.

Instead of sticking with the inverted pyramid, a story structure that’s been proven in the lab not to work, you’d think writers would stick a fork in it, then go experiment with other story structures. But no.

“The basic conservatism and frantic pace of our profession keeps us from enlarging our repertoire of forms,” the researchers lamented. “So … we keep boring and confusing our readers, and driving them away. … We should think of the inverted pyramid as A form, rather than THE form.”

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Source: “Ways With Words: A Research Report of the Literacy Committee,” American Society of Newspaper Editors, 1993

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