Feature Story Analysis

The story I chose is “The New Face of Hunger,” published originally in the August 2014 issue of National Geographic magazine, but I found the story published on their website. I think the story as Tracie McMillan reported it needed the magazine’s format for the space to give all the vivid details she did. Boiling this story down to the quick facts with short, interspersed quotes wouldn’t have the same impact that McMillan’s full piece does.

“The New Face of Hunger” is both a live-in and news feature. The story opens with Christina Dreier, a woman in Mitchell County, Iowa, sending her son to school without breakfast and follows her journey to feed herself and her son while augmenting Dreier’s personal story with the state of the country. So even though, the reader learns what Dreier’s life is like in very personal detail, there are also news elements throughout the larger story. McMillan transitions flawlessly from the microscopic detail with Dreier’s — and later other families’ — experiences to the large zoomed-out view of the state of the country and the magnitude of how many families just like Dreier’s are struggling with the same thing.

The lead for this story is an anecdotal, descriptive lead. As I mentioned earlier, the story opens with a Dreier making the tough decision to send her son to school without food. The morning is pronounced as “gold-gray,” and Dreier’s son is described as “barrel-chested and stubborn.” McMillan’s writing transports you to that morning with Dreier’s difficult decision clouding her morning. While the subject matter is already heart-breaking, the great writing grabs the reader’s attention to ensure they can’t look away.

There is descriptive writing throughout the story. There are events when Dreier or other mothers interviewed in the story are marking difficult decisions, and McMillan doesn’t need to lay out long quotes in order to explain their thoughts. Finally, the story concludes with a final anecdote about how Dreier views her family’s food situation and whether they are truly hungry. After describing all of the “dicey” moments Dreier maneuvers, McMillan is able to write:

What she has, Christina says, is a kitchen with nearly enough food most of the time. It’s just those dicey moments, after a new bill arrives or she needs gas to drive the kids to town, that make it hard. “We’re not starved around here,” she says one morning as she mixes up powdered milk for her daughter. “But some days, we do go a little hungry.”

At the end of the article, McMillan has shown this “new face of hunger.” Earlier in the article, a sociologist explains what hunger looks like in the present-day: “This is not your grandmother’s hunger.” Using these descriptive quotes and great writing, McMillan’s reporting comes full circle as she shows the new face of hunger without bopping the reader over the head with it. This for me is the circle kicker. The ending is full circle returning to the woman McMillan introduces the reader to at the beginning of the article. Unfortunately, there isn’t a solution to this problem just yet.

I think the most effective aspect of this feature story is the people McMillan chose to interview. Their words and how McMillan arranged them within the facts and statistics of the story are the epitome of showing, not telling for me. Reading a statistic like one-sixth of Americans don’t have enough food to eat is upsetting, but first, my mind goes to, “OK, what percentage is one-sixth again?” Numbers can distract; whereas, parents eating whatever scraps their children leave behind? A devastating detail that pushes home the reality of what one-sixth truly means.

The only thing that could have been done better is a redesign of the landing page and programming of the web page. The story is from about six years ago, so I think either National Geographic hasn’t maintained it as they would a more recent story or switched content management systems. There was a trove of photographs meant to accompany the article that didn’t load or were difficult to access. I would have loved to see the people that McMillan took great lengths to portray accurately, but again, I don’t think that would be something McMillan or the photographers really had control over.

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