Feature reporting and drafting checklist for magazine teams

What to take away

• Define the story's focus and reader promise before drafting.
• Build timelines and claim lists while reporting, not after problems appear.
• Separate observed detail, source memory, documentary fact, and inference.
• Test structure before polishing sentences.
• Check display copy and visuals against the same evidence as the article.

Use this checklist at assignment, reporting, draft, structural edit, and release. Not every feature needs every kind of source or scene. Every feature does need a defensible basis for what it states and a form that lets readers follow the evidence.

Focus and reporting plan

• State the feature's focus in one sentence.
• Define the reader's main question and promised answer or experience.
• List the central claims and what could confirm or challenge each one.
• Include people with direct knowledge, affected perspectives, records, data, and suitable specialists.
• Identify conflicts, gaps, access limits, safety issues, and response duties.
• Set reporting checkpoints before the final deadline.

For a narrative, build a dated event table alongside interviews. The Journalist's Resource's account of a journalistic method advises stating a working hypothesis, asking what would prove it false, and designing the reporting so a flawed hypothesis becomes visible before the story is finished. A dated table turns that advice into something checkable, because it shows at a glance which events rest on documents and which rest on a single recollection.

Scene and detail check

• Each scene has a known time, place, participants, sequence, and source basis.
• Exact quotes are supported by recordings, notes, documents, or clearly identified recollection.
• Physical and sensory details are verified and relevant.
• Interior thoughts are attributed to a defensible source.
• Composite people, invented dialogue, and fused moments are absent.
• Disputed accounts are represented fairly and with appropriate uncertainty.

Structure and movement

• The opening raises an honest question or establishes useful information.
• Context arrives before confusion, but does not reveal every later turn.
• Each section performs one identifiable job.
• Time, place, speaker, and viewpoint shifts are signaled.
• Examples support the larger point without pretending to prove prevalence alone.
• The ending completes the story's movement rather than restating the introduction.

Evidence, explanation, and language

Explanation is part of the evidence rather than a finish applied afterward. Digital.gov's guidance on writing for understanding recommends the active voice, the present tense, and direct verbs in place of nouns made from verbs, because each extra layer makes the reader work harder to recover the meaning. Apply that test to translated technical material. If the plain sentence changes what the evidence supports, the claim needs narrowing, not restyling.

• Every factual claim has a traceable source.
• Numbers include units, periods, populations, and meaningful context.
• Causation is not inferred from sequence or correlation alone.
• Technical language is translated without changing its meaning.
• Voice fits the evidence and does not ridicule or romanticize subjects.
• The writer distinguishes fact, analysis, quotation, and uncertainty.

Final package

• Names, dates, places, titles, figures, quotations, and links are checked.
• Headline, deck, captions, pull quotes, alt text, and social copy stay within the article's evidence.
• Photo subjects, credits, permissions, and alterations are recorded.
• Relevant subjects received a fair opportunity to respond.
• Corrections and update contacts are known.
• The accepted text and source record are preserved.

Common questions

Should the checklist be completed by one editor?

No. Assign ownership across writer, assigning editor, copy editor, fact-checker, designer, and producer.

Does a timeline belong in the published piece?

Only when it helps readers. The reporting timeline remains useful even when it is not published.

Must every claim have two sources?

No fixed number guarantees truth. Match corroboration to the claim's risk, dispute, and available evidence.

When is a feature ready to draft?

When its focus, evidence path, key scenes or explanatory blocks, gaps, and response needs are understood.