Features desk: I time
Journalists usually try to avoid ‘featuring’ in their articles, but sometimes an I is exactly the focus you need, says Tina Jackson
This month, it’s all about me – well, you, actually. Our series about feature-writing skills in journalism has so far concentrated on stories reported in third person, where the writer’s outsider position amplifies the reader’s knowledge by presenting accurate details of the how, where, what, why etc of a story. But there are times when you, and your personal point of view, make up a major part of the story.
Me first to the bar
Personal narratives and eyewitness accounts. Experiential writing. Memoirs. You may not (or perhaps you may!) want to write features like this one by Tom Usher on Vice.com in September: I Went on a Wetherspoons Holiday and Got Really, Really Drunk (http://writ.rs/wetherspoonsholiday) – an account of the writer doing just that, complete with photographic evidence. But in these times when Facebook and reality TV constitute a parallel virtual universe that many people prefer to the offline world, there’s increasingly a place for attention-grabbing personal accounts of something the writer has done, and a way of doing it so that despite it being ostensibly all about me, me, me, it’s about something else as well.
Unsurprisingly, the piece we’ve picked out is from Vice, which specialises in first-person documentary stories about unusual topics and uses the tropes of entertainment culture to trip its readers into well-researched and often exceptional current affairs stories. The Wetherspoons piece is a good, well-written example. Tom’s first-person story incorporates topical issues and facts so that it becomes a spirited, satirical account that pokes fun at British drinking culture and the budget holiday industry – and at the writer himself, as he cheerfully poses sunbathing in a pub car park.