The Profile Exercise

THE PROFILE EXERCISE

Your assignment: Find a person or persons of interest and do a feature profile-type story. The news worthiness of the subject should not be determined by “immediacy,“ but more by “human interest.“ You will forsake the news summary lede / inverted pyramid writing style and use one of the alternative story structures we will discuss later this semester. Make liberal use of description, scene-setting, dialogue and anecdotes. Feel free to use background research and material from other sources; your story should not come entirely from one source. Talk to others who know him or her (or them). This is not a forum for your opinions (description is not opinion), although the opinions of others about the subject are entirely acceptable. (Note: You might find the information about writing techniques that go beyond the inverted pyramid form in Chapter 6 of your textbook to be helpful.) Feel free to do some pre-writing on your intros, scene description or an overall rough draft and consult with me as needed.

Include contact information for your subject and yourself. Worthy papers will be submitted to the Chronicle’s ThisWeek editors for possible publication. The contact information will be needed for additional questions, to arrange photos, etc.

Length: Somewhere in the neighborhood of 25 to 50 paragraphs. An appropriate use of background development and direct quotes should make this easy to achieve.

Due: By the second to last class (session 13 usually). I would suggest that you let me see a rough draft before you submit the final version. Failure to hit the deadline will result in a 10-point reduction for every day the assignment is late (unless an extension has been pre-arranged with me.)

Grade: The grade on this assignment will be double that of previous story assignments; thus, this score will be significant toward your overall story-assignment grade.

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OBITUARY ASSIGNMENT

In a few weeks, you will be asked to write an obituary, a common newsroom task. Begin scanning the paid obits in area newspapers or other periodicals and select a worthy subject, a person you would have found interesting in life. Look for obits or paid mortuary items with extensive details on the deceased’s background and personality. Feel free to use Google and newspaper archives etc. to provide details absent from the paid obit and to fact-check. Please DO NOT contact the deceased’s family -- unless you are a family member or have a relationship with the family.