The reviewer from Laguna Niguel who says this book is boring apparently has been reading too many textbooks and therefore is only used to reading textbooks. Yes, the examples in this book are out of date, but so what? The full-text examples are still excellent articles after 15 years or so; great writing is always great writing even after it goes from being current events to being history. In 1984, I saw the transcript of Blundell's lectures on feature writing that became the basis for this book, and I still use this book in teaching my feature writing course and my magazine writing course, because nothing else comes close. Among many other accomplishments, this book gives students a SYSTEM for coming up with original story ideas and original story angles that most of them couldn't come up with on their own--in direct contrast to other books that use poetry or other gimmicks to try to make students "feel creative" and then be creative. Rather than being read once or not at all and/or being used only for reference, this is a book that should be read over and over again.