Good Feature

My feature example is from today's New York Times. It is the first of three articles covering New York City's foster care problems. The article is entitled "Foster Children at Risk, and an Opportunity Lost," with the alternate titles "A History of Neglect: Breach of Faith." Here's the link:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/05/nyregion/05foster.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Author Leslie Kaufman focuses mainly on Luis Medina, onetime director of St. Christopher's Inc. St. Christopher's is a foster agency in New York City; Medina is a Latino who grew up in a household that took in foster children, especially black and Latino children. He grew up to become an advocate for a different kind of foster care in New York City.

Medina felt that the largely white-run foster care system, both private and public, in New York City, was doing little to aid the plight of minority families. Indeed, he felt they were contributing to the problems, and was very outspoken about getting things changed. Due in large part to his activism, a twenty-year "ambitious undertaking to improve foster care for the city's black and Latino children [which] has spanned four mayoral administrations and consumed hundreds of millions of dollars in city, state and federal money" began. He was hired as the director of St. Christopher's in the early 1990's.

Medina's ideas were fairly simple: that white foster care providers had more of an interest in collecting their paychecks than in aiding New York's poorest families. In the interest of keeping children out of foster care for longer than necessary, and of placing them back with their parents as often as possible, while keeping them within their communities in the meantime, black and Latino caseworkers would be hired, and children would be placed with foster families close to where they lived.

Not only is this not what happened in the long run (although there were a few years of great success), St. Christopher's was a worse offender than most in neglecting and/or botching its foster cases. Between 1999 and 2005, seven children died due to the neglect of St. Christopher's workers.

This is a well-done feature in most respects. It starts with a semi-hard news lede, which tells us what, when, where, why, and part of who. The article, for the most part, keeps each person quoted within their own section (the exception being Medina), and organizes the information well into sections.

The only thing I didn't like about the article was that the balance seemed off to me. Depending on which point of view Kaufman was representing, her tone seemed to change. As I read, I could almost feel her sympathizing with each point of view as it came up, which was disturbing. I think she might have gotten a little too close to her subjects and lost some objectivity. I also think she could have laid out the problems a little more concisely. I noticed partway through that I tended to get a bit lost.