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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There is one great thing about the inverted pyramid lead.

“The only benefit of the inverted pyramid lead was that it put a lot of valuable information high in the story,” write Mario R. Garcia and Pegie Stark, authors of Eyes On the News: The Poynter Institute Color Research.

But, they say, there is a workaround: “Some papers are learning to do that with more effective heads and deck[s].”

That’s right: Lift your key ideas off the page with display copy.

Six places to put your key messages

Garcia and Stark recommend that you embed your most important information in:

• A main head
• A deck to expand the head
• Color-coded summaries of the three parts or modules of the story
• Subheads and summaries at each module
• A numbering system where appropriate
• A closing box of more information

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Source: Mario R. Garcia and Pegie Stark, Eyes On the News: The Poynter Institute Color Research, The Poynter Institute for Media Studies, 1991

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Making a publication “easy to read” is the No. 1 way to increase readership.

If newspapers (and, by extension, other publications) become more “relaxing to read” and make it easier “to find what I’m looking for,” people will:

• Spend more time reading the publication
• Read it more completely
• Read it more often

That was a key finding of “Impact,” a study by the Readership Institute.

How do you make it easy to read?

• Include more “go and do” information. This “news you can use” is the information readers need to take action on a story. Only 10 percent of all newspaper stories include it.
• Use the feature-style story structure instead of the inverted pyramid more often.
• Promote content more effectively. Do a better job of advertising your stories to make it easier for readers to find what they’re looking for.

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Source: “Understanding and Improving ‘Easy to Read’ Content,” Readership Institute

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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 I am afraid you are using it every day. It’s called the inverted pyramid. And, according to “Ways With Words,” a classic study by the American Society of Newspaper Editors, it does “not work well with readers.”

The problem with the pyramid

“Ways With Words” researchers studied four story structures and found that traditional, inverted-pyramid stories:

• “Do not work well with readers,” and “did not justify their predominance in today’s newspapers.”
• Scored low in readership and understanding.
• Made a mediocre showing in “involvement,” or whether the story made readers care about the news. (In our business, we call this “engagement.”)
• Were the least effective at getting the reader to the jump of all story forms studied.

Researchers identified two problems with the inverted pyramid:

• “The story gets more boring as the reader reads down.”
• “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. As a result, only journalists and sources can fully understand inverted-pyramid stories.”

Why are we still using this thing?

Back away from the pyramid.

Instead of sticking with a story form that’s been proven in the lab not to work, you’d think writers would experiment with other story structures. But, the researchers lamented:

Amen.

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