Reporting And Writing Profiles By Jacqui Banaszynski, U. Of Missouri/poynter Institute

Profiles

Jacqui Banaszynski (taken from 2003 Nieman Conference, “Profiles in Journalism,” Session #44)

Why write profiles? Successful profiles contain all the essential elements of narrative journalism. Good profile writing demands good interviewing -- a skill that transcends the form. The writer must learn how to describe people and place: to locate characters, to describe them physically, to explain their motivations. Profiles also teach responsible reporting. When you’re writing about one other person -- and that person knows it -- you must get it right.

Profiles provide specificity. They allow us to work at both ends of the ladder of abstraction. The profile is the micro that illustrates the macro. In my “AIDS in the Heartland” series, I wrote very intimately about two gay farmers from Minnesota who were dying of AIDS. The story was about much more than the two of them as individuals. It was about how people live and die with AIDS, and how their community deals with it.

The story’s specificity -- Dick Hanson and Bert Henningson, farmers and political activists -- sits at the bottom of the ladder of abstraction. What these two men represented – commitment, love, death and family struggle – is at the top of the ladder. Many newspaper stories are boring because they stay in the middle. There are no specific people, but no great themes, either. These stories have nothing to ground them, and nothing to raise them above the

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mundane.

The key to reporting for a profile is figuring out the questions. Interviews are crucial and not just with the person being profiled. Who are the people around him or her? Who will reveal something about the main character? Who knows the defining moments that shaped that person’s life? You need to interview those people.

You must ask deep questions. What has defined this person? What is this person’s motivation? Value system? Approach to life? “Who is this person?” To reach this deeply, you must ask questions that seem rather abstract. I once asked six men to were crossing Antarctica on foot – and almost died in the process – whether Antarctica was male or female, and why. The question helped them relate to the continent in a new and personal way. Ask people what they worry about most, or who most matters to them, or what makes them most afraid. Always follow these abstract questions with concrete ones, to elicit specific anecdotes.

Some people love to talk about themselves. A few people love to talk about themselves but don’t say much that is useful. They say things like, “The Lord made me do it” or, “I’ve got to hand it to my teammates.” Your job as an interviewer is to turn the subject into a storyteller.

Ask questions so layered, so deep, and so odd that they elicit unusual responses. Take the person to places she wouldn’t normally go. Ask questions that require descriptive answers. If your profile hinges on an important decision the subject had to make, ask them everything about the day of the decision. What kind of day was it? What was the first thing you did when you

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woke up in the morning? Do you remember what you had for breakfast? What was the weather was like? What were you wearing? Who did you think about that day? Did the phone ring? Walk me through the first two hours of your day. These things might not seem relevant to the story, but they serve to put the person back in the moment. Push a bit. Make some assumptions that require them to validate what you say, or to argue with you.

I once did a press conference with a top Olympic runner. Her resume painted the portrait of a woman who had it all: stellar athletic career, law degree, rich and adoring husband, covergirl looks. But she was in her thirties and still running. I asked if she was worried about what was missing from that picture: a baby. Was she racing her own biological clock? That made for a far more interesting story than another analysis of her running form.

Immerse yourself in your interviews. You must focus so intently on the moment that your mind is fully with the person you are interviewing. You need to listen so hard that you can move with the person, take another step forward or pull back. Don’t worry about your list of questions, your editor, or your story lede. Worry only about that person and what you can get from him. A friend of mine calls this full-body reporting. If you do it right, you will feel exhausted when you leave the interview.

The most important thing to any writing – and especially profile-writing -- is the telling detail. Reporters complain that editors remove the telling details from their profiles. Sometimes the editors do that because the details weren’t relevant enough. If it’s not showing something important, it’s not essential. Keep reporting until you find the absolutely essential details.

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Reporting for profiles requires moving in close. Then, you have to pull back. When you shift from reporting to writing, you must distance yourself from the characters. When you sit down at your desk, your allegiance switches. It feels as if your characters are looking over your shoulder, but you must turn your back on them. You don’t lose respect for your subjects or their story, but your allegiance must be with the reader.

After I’ve edited a profile, it must pass a test before I consider it finished. I ask the writer to give the piece to a reader who knows nothing about it. That new reader must be able to answer two questions, each in one sentence. First: How would you characterize this person? Second: At the end of the piece do you know whether or not you like the person? If the answers aren’t what the writer expected, the profile isn’t finished. There are many different kinds of profiles. I’ll describe just three. In my own terminology, they are: cradle-to-current, niche, and paragraph profiles.

Cradle-to-current profile After Gary Ridgway was arrested as the Green River Killer, responsible for murdering 48 women in Washington state, The Seattle Times wrote a profile that included everything about his life: where he grew up, the defining moments of his life -- when he first showed signs of pathology, when the police started chasing him. This type of profile requires knowing the full sweep of a person’s life. It demands a huge investment of time. A cradle-to-current profile is needed only in rare circumstances.

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Niche profile The niche profile is one of my favorites. It gets profiles in the newspaper quickly. You can do a niche profile, under 1,000 words, in just a couple of days. The key to the niche profile is figuring out exactly why a person is in the news and building on that.

While we had to do a cradle-to-crime profile of Gary Ridgway, we might have included a niche profile of the defense attorney who had to represent him. The niche profile doesn’t need to include where she was born or what she did in fifth grade, unless that directly relates to her role as Ridgway’s attorney. Her biographical information can be compressed, run as a small box or in tight form within the story. A niche profile describes how she came to the role and whether defending a serial killer presents an internal conflict for her.

To write a successful niche profile, you must have a very clear idea of what you are looking for: telling detail and quotes that serve the story’s purpose.

Paragraph profile The shortest profiles aren’t really profiles at all, but single paragraphs within larger stories. A paragraph profile transforms a fairly flat story into one with real characters. That helps your readers move through the story, because names are no longer merely names. The paragraph profile reveals something about a person’s character that is germane to the broader story.

While writing the most mundane beat stories, paragraph profiles allow you to push yourself to do the kind of reporting required for narrative writing. They force you to dig deeper –

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and to focus on what is truly relevant about the subject.

Again, if you were covering the Ridgway case, rather than name the detective who finally made the case, you might include a paragraph profile. That profile might say the detective had turned the hunt for the Green River Killer into a 25-year obsession that had haunted his dreams and filled dozens of boxes with dead-end leads. You might mention that the judge said a prayer or listened to a favorite song before he came into court that day.

There are many kinds of profiles, including those that don’t profile a person. The essential character could be a place, or a building, or a meeting. You don’t profile a City Council meeting by reporting on the results, or who voted on what, but by profiling the personality of the meeting, its pace, even its silliness. If you profile a snowplow driver, the main character could be the truck, the road, the snow, or the driver. Regardless of the subject, regarding people carefully will allow you to elucidate it.