A featured story is an article that appears prominently in a news widget, typically in the first position. It’s used for content that is either newsworthy, informative or entertaining and can be useful for e-commerce brands to highlight their new collections or share interesting user-generated content.

Unlike a hard news article, a feature story is usually more narrative in nature and relies on human interest to create an emotional connection with the audience. This helps in increasing reader retention and understanding of the topic at hand. These stories also tend to provide a more detailed account of a topic than hard news articles, incorporating more creative and descriptive elements.

While a hard news article might recount how a thousand people are being laid off from a factory, a good feature story will focus on one of those workers and portray their emotional turmoil—grief, anger or fear—at losing their job. Similarly, while a hard news article may cover the spread of a mosquito-borne disease, a good feature story will explore the effects of the illness on individual people and families.

A good feature story will take advantage of an expanded set of language and narrative strategies, but it should be a tight read as well. Like a news article, good feature writing requires a strong opening, an in-depth lede and a sharp, logical structure. Sentence-by-sentence editing is essential to cutting out redundancies and making sure every word carries its weight.