Text Box: Journalism Andrew Galarneau Tuesdays 7:00 - 9:40 Reg. No. 261312 Text Box: 398 Text Box: “Features” is the grab-bag term for newspaper and magazine stories that aren’t about what happened yesterday, otherwise known as “news.” Features come in lots of different flavors. Profiles aim to give readers a chance to acquaint themselves with someone they want to hear about, or whose story evokes the lives and struggles of many. Issue stories explore a subject of national discussion through conversations with local people and institutions more people can, at least in theory, relate to. Real life stories recreate the awful and the wonderful in people’s lives for all to read through the hands of the writer. Done right, feature stories can be the most eloquent, best-read parts in any newspaper or magazine. This course aims to teach writers the basic elements of feature stories and give them a chance to write those kind of articles themselves. We will deal with recognizing potential stories, figuring out how to report them, and preparing for research. We will learn how to find the right people to talk to, and how to interview them to bring their information and viewpoints to our writing. My class is a boot camp of sorts for beginning non-fiction writers. Like boot camp, it aims to compress years of field experience into a short, intense, and sometimes stressful course. Succeeding will take doing things you probably have never done before. For instance, you will have to locate people with valuable knowledge for your stories, and convince them to submit to interviews. Then you’ll have to fashion those interviews, and other information, into pieces that grab readers’ attention. That’s not always easy – but neither is this class. Here, you have to do what it takes to get the job done. The class, taught by an award-winning feature writer for The Buffalo News, is not meant for beginning writers. Completion of English 201 or its equivalent should be considered a minimum qualification before registering.