This article is part of a series called Backstory where I reveal how feature and in-depth stories were crafted. You can find more with the Backstory tag by searching “Backstory” in the search bar.
The original story was published here:
By the end of our third semester, Morgane and I have worked together on at least one story per academic month. So far, we had been churning out some excellent stories and wanted to end the semester with a giant feature article.
I had been to Stanstead, Quebec during the summer and knew of a few of the town’s quirks, such as how the library straddles the international border. The border was slated to open the same week as our assignment deadline, so there was a solid news hook to it, too.
As usual, the two of us got down to business and started listing the people we would need to interview on both sides of the border, photos that should accompany the story, and statistics to turn into graphics. There was an abundance of organizations on both sides, so the two of us split the task by which categories of people were more likely to speak which language. I got all the government requests and she got most of the interviews with businesses.
I already had plenty of photos from my last trip to Stanstead, but I could always head over to take more if needed. Data on border crossings and infection rates were public, so that was also straightforward to turn into line graphs.
We thought we’d just produce in-depth content, not a really long article. What we planned out to be about 1,500 words long became 3,000 words. Interviewing small towns are different from interviewing big city experts. One interview leads to another. The café owner suggested that we speak with the mother of a recently wedded bride, the pastor suggested I speak with the volunteer delivery driver. It just snowballed into a giant piece.
We had to think of creative ways to condense the information we had into fewer words, so I made two multimedia elements on top of the graphs she made. I turned the mayor’s interview into an audio file and the volunteer’s delivery run into a video. It took the same amount of time to go through the entire article, but it took up less screen space and made the content more palatable.
I’m very much intrigued by quirky facts, so I used the photo captions to explain how the border worked for residents. I even added a little section on my interaction with border authorities in both countries to bring the readers to the location with me. Turns out, the editor also loves obscure facts. Bonus points.
