How do you come up with ideas for feature articles?

Do feature articles have to be about catastrophes or celebrities to be good? According to the award-winning German print journalist, Henning Sußebach, not at all. Sußebach believes that intriguing topics can be found directly on your doorstep. In this blog post, he explains how ideas taken from everyday life can be made into stories that engage readers.

How do journalists find their stories? To tell you the truth, I’m not sure if it isn’t the other way around – that it’s the stories which find the journalists. When this happens, it often makes for a better article because the journalist isn’t trying too hard to make an idea work; the story was already there just waiting to be told.

But happens when you run out of ideas? Does talking help? Or going for a walk? Is there a short cut to finding topics?

I believe that good journalists find their stories intuitively. Mainly because if a journalist has been forced into writing on a particular topic, the resulting article can quickly becomes dull. And dullness isn’t really the essence of a feature article.

Where do ideas come from?

Whether your topics are planned or come intuitively, I can think of four typical ways to find ideas – but there are certainly more.

Firstly, there is the dramatic event. By this, I mean there is a deed (such as a murder) or a catastrophe (such as an earthquake) and the journalist describes the circumstances surrounding the drama, and its developments and consequences.

Then there are celebrities – people who are so famous that just being able to interview them is enough of a reason to write an article, which usually turns out to be a profile.

Then there is a kind of explanatory construct that has been prevalent in past years because journalism decided that its role was to explain globalization – and globalization also embraced journalism.

The goal of this kind of feature, whether writing about refugees, workplace re-locations or the journey of a piece of donated clothing, is to describe how things around the world are interconnected and the effect of these interconnections on individuals.

Most of these explanatory articles are dreamt up at the journalist’s desk and then fleshed out. The article has many locations and various main characters who generally have diverse functions and come from different parts of society. This kind of story has, for example, made the character of the “Chinese textile worker” popular in feature articles in Germany.

Stories of everyday life

Finally, there is another way to find stories. Compared to topics with a global scope, though, they seem strangely banal and old-fashioned. I don’t have an exact term for these kinds of stories, even though they are my favourite at the moment. You could call them stories of everyday occurrences, or stories of normality, or stories in search of what is nearby that people have overlooked in the last years.

What is going on in the mind of a 20-year-old German soldier, who has decided to risk his life in Afghanistan? In a country freed of dictatorship, is the birth of democracy in the first freely elected parliament more powerfully described by the daily life of a backbencher or by a portrait of the prime minister?

What about a homeless person in Germany whose livelihood is dependent on collecting deposit bottles that those better off can afford to throw away? How do they view their country? What is the life like of a 24-year-old woman in Eisenhüttenstadt, a small town in former Eastern Germany near the Polish border? Or what is it like to live as a child in America’s Midwest in the middle of a drought and far from any towns?

I think there are two aspects to consider if writing stories of everyday occurrences.

Firstly, in some cases journalists may have to force themselves to be curious because they aren’t as inspired by these as with other topics. These stories sometimes don’t write themselves; sometimes they aren’t there, at least not with a defined beginning and fixed ending – and sometimes they peter out half way though.

Cast character like in a movie

Secondly, and this is different to articles covering dramatic events or celebrities, journalists sometimes need to cast their main character as if for a movie. But why?

Because many of the people that these kinds of stories focus on find their lives normal and not worth talking about. And not every 20-year-old German soldier is loquacious enough to fill a feature article. And not every homeless person is reliable enough to meet up for second, third, or even fourth interview. In my opinion, protagonists of everyday stories need to inspire you because you are availing yourself of their lives. Of course, there is the uneasy feeling of not being representative.

It’s true; the profile of a homeless person who has fallen too far to be able to speak to the media won’t get written in the first place. But that does that mean there shouldn’t be any of this kind of article at all.

In such cases, I speak to three or four people for several hours each before I decide which one to profile. What someone has to say isn’t the only important thing. It’s also important that the person speaks freely (without being naive) to the reporter and that he or she isn’t too hell-bent on getting in the newspaper. I believe it is also important for the person to be halfway likeable.

That may not sound very journalistic because journalists should be critical (and have to be of public figures). But it is important for crafting a story about completely normal folk that the people featured are engaging. I am sure that reporters are prepared to go the extra mile if they actually like spending time with people they are going to write about. And it’s when journalists are honestly interested in their interviewees and want to engage with them that they discover surprising things about their interviewees lives.

If that isn’t the case, then the resulting feature often reinforces old stereotypes or pokes fun at the so-called common people. The reader doesn’t gain any kind of insight; rather they learn something about the arrogance of the writer.

Fascinating new worlds

If journalists avoid this mistake, they will frequently uncover a parallel world that they didn’t even know existed, a parallel world that they can then share with the reader. And without the feature article, this parallel world, which sometimes borders directly on the reader’s world, would have remained invisible.

The homeless man explains how you should never sleep with your hands inside your sleeping bag because otherwise you can’t defend yourself when you are attacked. Then the young soldier who has returned from Afghanistan tells you about how he recounts stories about the Afghan war to his father. How history has been turned on its head!

In the best case scenario, journalists produce articles that readers remember for a long time, simply because they are reminded of them when they go about their daily lives. In comparison, a dramatic event is quickly forgotten.

Henning Sußebach is a reporter at the weekly newspaper, Die Zeit. He has won some of Germany’s most renowned journalism awards, including the Theodor-Wolff Prize and the Egon-Erwin-Kisch Prize.

This article was originally published in German in Reporter Forum.