Essential Tips for Producing Great News Features

Essential Tips for Producing Great News Features A news feature is a kind of story that focuses on a hard-news topic. News features combine a feature writing style with hard-news reporting. Here are a few tips for producing news features. Find a Topic Thats Doable News features typically try to shed light on problems in our society, but many people doing news features for the first time try to tackle topics that are just too large. They want to write about crime, or poverty or injustice. But books- indeed, hundreds of books- can and have been written about subjects so broad. What you need to do is find a narrow, focused topic that can be covered reasonably well in the space of a 1,000-to-1,500-word news feature. Want to write about crime? Focus on one particular neighborhood or even a specific housing complex, and narrow it down to one type of crime. Poverty? Pick a particular kind, whether its homeless people on the streets of your city or single mothers who cant feed their kids. And again, narrow your scope to your community or a neighborhood. Find Real People News features tackle important topics but theyre still like any other kind of feature- theyre people stories. That means you have to have real people in your stories who will bring the topic youre discussing to life. So if youre going to write about homeless people youll need to interview as many as you can find. If youre writing about a drug epidemic in your community youll need to interview addicts, cops and counselors. In other words, find people who are on the front lines of the issue youre writing about, and let them tell their stories. Get Plenty of Facts and Stats News features need people, but they also need facts and plenty of em. So if your story claims there is a methamphetamine epidemic in your community, you need to have the facts to back that up. That means getting arrest statistics from cops, treatment numbers from drug counselors, and so on. Likewise, if you think homelessness is on the rise, youll need numbers to back that up. Some evidence can be anecdotal; a cop saying hes seeing more homeless people on the streets is a good quote. But in the end, theres no substitute for hard numbers. Get the Expert View At some point, every news feature needs an expert to talk about the issue being discussed. So if youre writing about crime, dont just talk to the beat cop: interview a criminologist. And if youre writing about a meth epidemic, talk to meth users, yes, but also interview someone whos studied the drug and its spread. Experts lend news features authority and credibility. Get the Big Picture Its crucial to have a local focus for a news feature, but its also good to give a broader perspective. So if youre writing about homelessness in your town, try to find some stats on homelessness nationwide. Or if your story is on a local meth epidemic, find out if other cities around the country are seeing the same thing. This big picture kind of reporting shows that theres a larger context to the issue youre writing about. As for finding national statistics, federal government agencies crunch numbers on virtually every aspect of our lives. So check out their websites.

Definition and Examples of Hypernyms in English

Definition and Examples of Hypernyms in English In  linguistics  and  lexicography, a  hypernym is a  word whose meaning includes the meanings of other words. For instance, flower is a hypernym of daisy and rose. Adjective:  hypernymous. Put another way, hypernyms (also called superordinates and supertypes) are general words; hyponyms  (also called subordinates) are subdivisions of more general words. The semantic relationship between each of the more specific words (e.g., daisy and rose) and the more general term (flower) is called hyponymy or inclusion. Etymology From the Greek, extra name Examples and Observations [A] hypernym is a broad, superordinate label that applies to many members of a set, while the members themselves are the hyponyms. Hyponymy is a hierarchical relationship, and it may consist of a number of levels. For example, dog is a hyponym of animal, but it is also the hypernym of poodle, alsatian, chihuahua, terrier, beagle and so on. (Jan McAllister and James E. Miller, Introductory Linguistics for Speech and Language Therapy Practice. Wiley-Blackwell, 2013) A hypernym is a word with a general meaning that has basically the same meaning of a more specific word. For example, dog is a hypernym, while collie and chihuahua are more specific subordinate terms. The hypernym tends to be a basic-level category that is used by speakers with high frequency; speakers usually refer to collies and chihuahuas as dogs, rather than using the subordinate terms, which are consequently of relatively low frequency. (Laurie Beth Feldman, Morphological Aspects of Language Processing. Lawrence Erlbaum, 1995) The foot of footstep narrows down the type of step being expressed to the step made by a foot. A footstep is a kind of step; or, in more technical terms, footstep is a hyponym, or subtype, of step, and step is a hypernym, or supertype, of footstep. . . . Doorstep is also a hyponym of step, and step is a hypernym of doorstep. (Keith M. Denning, Brett Kessler, and William Ronald Leben, English Vocabulary Elements. Oxford University  Press, 2007) Hypernyms, Hyponyms, and Connotations Hyponyms are more likely to carry  strong connotations than  hypernyms, though this is not an invariable rule. The word animal can carry negative connotations in metaphors such as He behaved like an animal. However, more specific connotations can be carried by the use of more specific words. He ate like a pig. You rat! Shes a bitch. (Maggie Bowring et al.,  Working with Texts: A Core Introduction to Language Analysis.  Routledge, 1997) A Method of Definition The most illuminating way of defining a lexeme is to provide a hypernym along with various distinguishing features- an approach to definition whose history can be traced back to Aristotle. For example, a majorette is a girl (the hypernym) who twirls a baton and accompanies a marching band. It is usually possible to trace a hierarchical path through a dictionary, following the hypernyms as they become increasingly abstract until we arrive at such general notions (essence, being, existence) that clear sense-relations between the lexemes no longer exist. (David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language. Cambridge University  Press, 2003) Alternate Spellings: hyperonym