Pulitzer Prize winners Eli Saslow and Lane DeGregory share what makes feature stories special
Pictured at left: Lane DeGregory (photo by Cherie Diez). Right: Eli Saslow (photo by Joanna Ceciliani)
By Laura T. Coffey
How would you define a feature story if you were judging the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing category?
Would you limit your definition to nonfiction narratives that maintain a measure of objectivity and rely on observation, scenes and dialogue? Or would you broaden it to include essays, columns, advocacy journalism and first-person pieces?
Based on a discussion between Eli Saslow, the 2023 winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing, and Lane DeGregory, who helped judge the category, Pulitzer judges had their hands full this year. At a virtual Society for Features Journalism program on June 27, DeGregory and Saslow talked about the judges’ efforts to define, in a fundamental way, what a feature story even is.
“The idea of a feature story has changed,” said DeGregory, a longtime feature writer for the Tampa Bay Times in Florida and the winner of the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing. “I also think that it changed in 2016 a lot when they opened it up to magazine writing. All of a sudden, newspaper writers are competing against The Atlantic and The New Yorker and all these things that we aspire to, but we don’t have the time and resources that a lot of those magazines do.”
Saslow, who joined The New York Times in February as a writer at large, described his approach to getting the four “traditional” nonfiction narratives included in his Pulitzer entry, which he wrote when he was still working at The Washington Post:
Anger and heartbreak on Bus No. 15: As American cities struggle to recover from the pandemic, Denver’s problems spill over onto its buses
An American education: Amid a historic U.S. teacher shortage, a ‘Most Outstanding Teacher’ from the Philippines tries to help save a struggling school in rural Arizona
The moral calculations of a billionaire: After the best year in history to be among the super-rich, one of America’s 745 billionaires wonders: ‘What’s enough? What’s the answer?’
Fixing the broken lovelies: As American cities deteriorate, a psychiatric nurse in Seattle reckons with the high price of compassion
“I’m often looking at: What are the big tension points in the country? What are the big fissures that matter in big ways? And how can I take these big issues and make them feel personal in ways that hopefully illuminate them in a new way?” Saslow said.
“For me, the reason that I’m often writing stories that unfold almost entirely in dialogue and scene is that I’m doing whatever I can, I hope, to create a very direct interaction between the reader and the person they’re reading about. … My presence is not felt.”
Saslow said he doesn’t feel comfortable inserting himself as a narrator or a tour guide in a story. Instead, he prefers to take readers up to “a clear pane of glass” so that they can watch the events of a story unfold on their own.
This way, he said, “it feels to the reader like they’ve seen something and understood something for themselves, and so the conclusions that they draw feel like their own, not like something that they’ve been told to think or told to surmise.”
History of a middle-aged category
The Pulitzer Prizes have been around since 1917, but the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing category is considerably newer: It’s been in existence for 44 years.
For much of that time, nonfiction narrative pieces like Saslow’s and DeGregory’s have been celebrated in the Feature Writing category, with some notable and deeply personal exceptions. They include Howell Raines’ account of his childhood friendship with his family’s Black housekeeper, which won in 1992, and George Lardner Jr.’s examination of his own daughter’s murder, which won in 1993.
In recent years — particularly since 2016 when magazines became eligible for Pulitzer Prizes in all journalism categories — more top prizes in Feature Writing have been going to writers who get much more involved in their stories and are unafraid to share their own points of view. For instance, consider these winning entry descriptions from Pulitzer judges:
In 2018, Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, a freelance reporter for GQ, won “for an unforgettable portrait of murderer Dylann Roof, using a unique and powerful mix of reportage, first-person reflection and analysis of the historical and cultural forces behind his killing of nine people inside Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C.”
In 2021, Mitchell S. Jackson, a freelance contributor for Runner’s World, won “for a deeply affecting account of the killing of Ahmaud Arbery that combined vivid writing, thorough reporting and personal experience to shed light on systemic racism in America.”
In 2022, Jennifer Senior of The Atlantic won “for an unflinching portrait of a family’s reckoning with loss in the 20 years since 9/11, masterfully braiding the author's personal connection to the story with sensitive reporting that reveals the long reach of grief.”
In like manner, both finalists for the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing were key players in the stories they covered:
Elizabeth Bruenig of The Atlantic was a finalist for a series of stories about botched executions in the state of Alabama. Her stories led to a temporary moratorium on the death penalty.
Janelle Nanos of The Boston Globe was a finalist for the story Kate Price remembers something terrible, a 10-year-long investigation of a woman’s quest to confirm her childhood sexual abuse (with Nanos’ help).
Identifying ‘meaningful, memorable work’
When DeGregory asked Saslow how he felt about recent shifts in the kinds of coverage being celebrated, he said he has no problem widening the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing tent.
“What I care about as a journalist is big, ambitious, meaningful work,” Saslow said. “The last thing I would want to do would be to craft a definition of feature writing that excludes more things from the tent.”
He noted the distinctions between his stories and those written by this year’s finalists.
“They’re very different from what I do and, frankly, very different from what I’d be capable of doing,” Saslow said. “I think the death penalty work from The Atlantic — some of its power is that it comes from a very clear point of view. There’s real moral clarity in general in the way that she writes. … And The Boston Globe story, her role in the story was a very big part of actually what happened in the story, so it was necessarily first-person because she was the secondary character. …
“I think what a ‘feature story’ signals to a lot of people is: This is work that is big and meaningful and that I put a lot of time into. Those are the stories all of us came into journalism to do,” he added. “Having it be a little bit fluid between categories, to me, is good for all of us because basically it’s just saying, ‘We care about meaningful, memorable work.’ And that can be done in different ways. That’s the beauty of journalism.”
Watch the presentation and learn reporting tips
Here’s how to watch the entire SFJ presentation with Saslow and DeGregory (in two separate installments because of an internet hiccup!):
The first installment(18 minutes) includes an introduction followed by Saslow and DeGregory’s discussion about how to define a feature story.
The second installment(54 minutes) picks up in the middle of Saslow’s description of how he got his story about Suna Karabay, the driver of Bus No. 15 in Denver. From there, DeGregory and Saslow share their tricks and tips for building trust with sources and writing the kinds of stories they love to tackle, and they both answer questions from the audience.
Huge thanks to Lane DeGregory and Eli Saslow for sharing their stories and their wisdom with us! To learn even more from DeGregory, be sure to check out her new must-read book for feature writers, editors and journalism educators: “The Girl in the Window and Other True Tales: An Anthology with Tips for Finding, Reporting, and Writing Nonfiction Narratives.”
To participate in more discussions like this one in the future, please join SFJ and hang out with us some more! Here’s how to join free of charge for the rest of this calendar year.
Laura T. Coffey is vice president of the Society for Features Journalism and a longtime editor and feature writer. She’s also the author of the bestselling nonfiction book “My Old Dog: Rescued Pets with Remarkable Second Acts.” Connect with Laura here.