What's too long for a good feature

I don't have an issue with 2400 words if the content is good. Are the breakouts necessary though?

 

Someone talking bout me?

But yes, heed the wise DD's wisdom.

 

With stories that are longer and carry more depth, I like to break them into sections with subheads introducing each.

This could easily be broken into three sections. 1. How it was diagnosed. 2. How it is managed. 3. How does it effect athletes?

 

If this journalism shit doesn't work out, how about P.I. work?

 

I don't have a problem with the length necessarily, but stories for newspapers need to be focused.

You can have a super story that's focused or a narrative tale on a diabetic athlete at 70 inches or a rambling, empty-the-notebook mess that's 20 inches long.

In general, if you aren't feeling awful about leaving something good out that just doesn't fit, the story is probably too damn long.

 

I did something on a diabetic athlete, it was about 2,000 words and that includes the breakouts.
It was juvenile diabetes and now he plays college basketball with an insulin pump.
One of the breakouts was how the first time he tried to fly, they weren't going to let him on the plane because they thought he was wired to explode.
It was a story that probably should have been longer.
2,400 for the mainbar plus the five breakouts doesn't seem excessive.
2,400 words for the mainbar and nothing else, is probably too long.

 

We're legislated to 800 words tops. It's ridiculous, but I got shit, and then I got cut for a story on a former basketball player who is now a medical doctor in the Canadian forces and has come off recent tours of Haiti and Afghanistan. She came back to speak at a breakfast full of young impressionable middle school and high school girls...it was dynamite stuff. And it got slashed and I got a shitty memo on length of stories. I get pissed off even thinking about it now.

 

This is horrendous.

 

This is why writers with a capital W probably should look to get out of newspapers. In "Telling True Stories," a compilation of storytelling advice put out by the Niemann Foundation at Harvard, one of them even suggests we all give screen writing a try. I imagine sports writers, with our eye for scene setting, would be pretty good at that.

 

Quite frankly, we woudln't have the space in our section to run 2,400 words plus 5 breakouts and other charts and graphics.

 

You say you broke it down as much as you could. Do you mean the disease, or specifically how this athlete has dealt with it? I'm thinking that you don't need to get into an in-depth description of the disease if that's what you meant by that. It's a pretty common disease and one that most people can read about without much of an explanation IMO.
(If that's not what you meant by breaking it down, disregard this post.)

 

From a former English teacher: It should be like a woman's skirt — long enough to cover the subject but short enough to keep it interesting.