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Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication
Feature journalism has developed from being a marginal and subordinate supplement to (hard) news in newspapers, to becoming a significant part of journalism on all platforms. It emerged as a key force driving the popularisation and tabloidisation of the press. Feature journalism is here defined as a family of genres that share a common exigence, understood as a publicly recognized need to be entertained and connected with other people on a mainly emotional level by accounts of personal experiences that are related to contemporary events of perceived public interest. This exigence is articulated through three characteristics that has dominate feature journalism from the very beginning: it is intimate, in the sense that it portrays people and milieus in close detail, and in the sense that it allows the journalist to be subjective and therefore intimate with his/her audience; it is literary in the sense that it is closely connected with the art of writing, narrativity, storytelling and worlds of fiction; and it is adventurous, in the sense that it takes the audiences on journeys to meet people and places that are interesting. Traditional and well-established genres of feature journalism include the human-interest story, the feature reportage and the profile, which all promote subjectivity and emotions as key ingredients in feature journalism in contrast to the norm of objectivity found in professional news journalism . Feature journalism therefore establishes a conflict of norms which has existed throughout the history of journalism. Feature journalism has become an increasingly popular part of journalism also in digital media. Online newspapers have experimented with digital formats for feature journalism since the late 1990s, first with technology-driven multimedia feature journalism, later with story-driven long-form feature journalism. Since 2010, podcasts and online templets for long-form journalism has made digital feature journalism popular.
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