ABSTRACT
The term ‘genre’ can be applied both to versions (news, features) and types (fashion, music) of journalism. As Fredric Jameson writes (2000: 268): ‘Genres are essentially literary institutions, or social contracts between a writer and a specific public, whose function is to specify the proper use of a particular cultural artifact.’ And he cautions that it is ‘the generic contract and institution itself which, along with so many other institutions and traditional practices, falls casualty to the gradual penetration of a market system and a money economy’. Named genres are a useful way of identifying aspects of features as well as the kind of expectations brought by readers to them: it follows that the closer the match between the two, the more successful the feature is likely to be.
