In late January, a photographer at work told me about an unusual basketball game. It was just a normally scheduled game, but the stands were packed, everyone was dressed in school colors and the atmosphere was electric.

Turns out it was a rivalry game, but not just any rivalry game. Anacortes High School had asked Burlington-Edison High School if they would be their rival. The story is here, but the short version is Anacortes has lost students over the years and their previous rivalries have disappeared as Anacortes has moved down a league or two. School administrators and students wanted to ramp up school spirit.

I decided right then and there that I had to write a story about it.

A secret: I am a huge sucker for school spirit. This may brand me as a dork or a nerd, but I always dressed up as whatever spirit day it was when I went to high school. Wear green and gold day? Check. Injury day? Leg braces, an arm sling and crutches. By the time senior year rolled around, I was voted as “most spirited girl” in the senior superlatives. This was a huge surprise to me because I thought I wasn’t that popular.

So in short, the nerd in me was intrigued. I thought it was cute that another school would ask another to be its rival.

Reporting the story was a challenge because the game had already happened. Not only that, when the photographer worked the game, they were shooting a basketball game, not the fans. It took me a couple of weeks to get all of the reporting done. I had to find snippets of time between my other assignments to fit it into my schedule.

In the few days before it ran, I kept poking and prodding the story: twisting a sentence here, changing a phrase there, double and triple checking my spelling. I actually woke up in a panic the night before it ran because I was afraid that something was wrong.

I was really happy with the finished story. Turns out a lot of the staff had read it before it went in the paper and they started sharing stories of their high school days (who knew we had three former cheerleaders in our newsroom?). One person even said they wished they could have gone to the game after reading the story.

This post is the first in a monthly series, Story of the Month.

A man and his wife goes to a bar to enjoy a well-deserved night out. The night ends with his wife trying to administer CPR on his beaten, broken body, and she will remember the taste of his blood on her lips for the rest of her life. Art was killed by three gang members after he tried to defuse a situation in the men’s restroom.

What follows is a meticulously reconstructed narrative by Jon Wells of the Hamilton Spectator. Trust me, it’s worth the couple of hours it will take you to get through the entire series. If you don’t like crying in front of people, make sure you’re alone for the last two installments. I bawled like a baby in one part, but it probably didn’t help that I was listening to the last half of Evanescence’s album, “The Open Door”.

First off it’s always great to go and see the students doing stuff instead of phone interviews. I’ve always believed you get more out of seeing things in the classrooms and observing.

Second, I’m a huge weather buff. I love anything to do with weather, especially extreme weather. The more we went into the countryside, the more amazed I was. Trust me when I say the pictures you see on TV and Online do not do it justice. Just listen to the audio to hear teacher Kevin Gudgel, who is from there, talk about his incredulity.

Finally I really like telling hard stories. This was a difficult one because it’s so easy to over-dramatize what you see. It would also have been very easy to dwell more outside the story instead of focusing on the students’ reactions. I think this story has a good balance of everything. I hope you agree.

But how should we convey that information?

According to Northwestern University’s Readership Institute, readers want news in packaged formats that are easy to read. They also overwhelmingly want feature-style writing, according to this study. Follow the link to see the difference between inverted pyramid and feature, or narrative, writing. It engages the reader more. It tells a story rather than reports on events. This is what reporters will have to do to survive in a landscape that competes for a consumer’s attention.

Newspapers in the United States use inverted pyramid style for 69 percent of all stories, feature-style writing for 18 percent, and commentary for 12 percent. While inverted pyramid style is appropriate for most stories, nonetheless there is strong evidence that an increase in the amount of feature-style stories has wide-ranging benefits.

Unfortunately the biggest obstacle the reporter faces is his or her own editor. I face this at my job, where my editor tells me there is not always a feature in every story. He is probably right. Features tend to take more space. And the only reason they take more time to write is because most journalists were trained in the inverted pyramid style of writing. Jon Franklin, a two-time Pulitzer prizewinner, suggests in his book “Writing for Story” that once you practice the feature style it becomes second nature and it won’t take as much time.

I have used Mr. Franklin’s advice for almost a year now, and I am writing these features quicker than ever before. It just takes time and practice.