About In-Depth Features/Profiles

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NewsHounds:

For those unclear about what “in-depth” features or personality profiles are, here are some examples from the best of the best—the Pulitzer Prizes for feature writing.

No one expects you to write this kind of stuff at this stage of your careers (if you do, I’m your agent!), but just as the only way to learn how to draw or sculpt or hang wallpaper is to study the experts, the best way to learn good writing is to read good writing.

So—once again!—I recommend to you the website of the Pulitzer Prizes, the best of American journalism. The main webpage is here. Click on any of the years in the scroll bar across the top, and you find the best of that year’s writing in various categories.

Below, I’ve picked out a couple of the feature-writing winners, for your convenience. Don'’t like these? look at others.

The 2009 Pulitzer Prizes will be announced, as always, at 3 p.m. (Eastern) on April 20. It’s both particularly exciting and particularly poignant for me this year, a decade after I served as a Pulitzer juror, as newspapers struggle to survive, but their work has (I predict) never been better. See my Pulitzer column here.

Anyway, check out some feature Pulitzer winners of the past, and see what inspires you.

El Peez

Pearls Before Breakfast
By Gene Weingarten
The Washington Post
April 8, 2007

Can one of the nation’s great musicians cut through the fog of a D.C. rush hour? Let’s find out.

HE EMERGED FROM THE METRO AT THE L’ENFANT PLAZA STATION AND POSITIONED HIMSELF AGAINST A WALL BESIDE A TRASH BASKET. By most measures, he was nondescript: a youngish white man in jeans, a long-sleeved T-shirt and a Washington Nationals baseball cap. From a small case, he removed a violin. Placing the open case at his feet, he shrewdly threw in a few dollars and pocket change as seed money, swiveled it to face pedestrian traffic, and began to play.

It was 7:51 a.m. on Friday, January 12, the middle of the morning rush hour. In the next 43 minutes, as the violinist performed six classical pieces, 1,097 people passed by. Almost all of them were on the way to work, which meant, for almost all of them, a government job. L’Enfant Plaza is at the nucleus of federal Washington, and these were mostly mid-level bureaucrats with those indeterminate, oddly fungible titles: policy analyst, project manager, budget officer, specialist, facilitator, consultant.

Each passerby had a quick choice to make, one familiar to commuters in any urban area where the occasional street performer is part of the cityscape: Do you stop and listen? Do you hurry past with a blend of guilt and irritation, aware of your cupidity but annoyed by the unbidden demand on your time and your wallet? Do you throw in a buck, just to be polite? Does your decision change if he’s really bad? What if he’s really good? Do you have time for beauty? Shouldn’t you? What’s the moral mathematics of the moment?

On that Friday in January, those private questions would be answered in an unusually public way. No one knew it, but the fiddler standing against a bare wall outside the Metro in an indoor arcade at the top of the escalators was one of the finest classical musicians in the world, playing some of the most elegant music ever written on one of the most valuable violins ever made. His performance was arranged by The Washington Post as an experiment in context, perception and priorities—as well as an unblinking assessment of public taste: In a banal setting at an inconvenient time, would beauty transcend?

See the rest of this story here.

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A Muslim Leader in Brooklyn, Reconciling 2 Worlds
By Andrea Elliott
The New York Times
March 5, 2006

An Imam in America

The imam begins his trek before dawn, his long robe billowing like a ghost through empty streets. In this dark, quiet hour, his thoughts sometimes drift back to the Egyptian farming village where he was born.

But as the sun rises over Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, Sheik Reda Shata’s new world comes to life. The R train rattles beneath a littered stretch of sidewalk, where Mexican workers huddle in the cold. An electric Santa dances in a doughnut shop window. Neon signs beckon. Gypsy cabs blare their horns.

The imam slips into a plain brick building, nothing like the golden-domed mosque of his youth. He stops to pray, and then climbs the cracked linoleum steps to his cluttered office. The answering machine blinks frantically, a portent of the endless questions to come.

A teenage girl wants to know: Is it halal, or lawful, to eat a Big Mac? Can alcohol be served, a waiter wonders, if it is prohibited by the Koran? Is it wrong to take out a mortgage, young Muslim professionals ask, when Islam frowns upon monetary interest?

The questions are only a piece of the daily puzzle Mr. Shata must solve as the imam of the Islamic Society of Bay Ridge, a thriving New York mosque where several thousand Muslims worship.

Read the rest of this story here.

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Enrique’s Journey—Chapter One
By Sonia Nazario
The Los Angeles Times
September 29, 2002

The Boy Left Behind

The boy does not understand.

His mother is not talking to him. She will not even look at him. Enrique has no hint of what she is going to do.

Lourdes knows. She understands, as only a mother can, the terror she is about to inflict, the ache Enrique will feel and finally the emptiness.

The view through a fence at the home where Enrique lived with his paternal grandmother. Across the valley were his sister and the only phone on which they occasionally talked to their mother. Enrique ended the strained calls by saying, “I want to be with you.”

What will become of him? Already he will not let anyone else feed or bathe him. He loves her deeply, as only a son can. With Lourdes, he is a chatterbox. “Mira, Mami.” Look, Mom, he says softly, asking her questions about everything he sees. Without her, he is so shy it is crushing.

Slowly, she walks out onto the porch. Enrique clings to her pant leg. Beside her, he is tiny. Lourdes loves him so much she cannot bring herself to say a word. She cannot carry his picture. It would melt her resolve. She cannot hug him. He is 5 years old.

They live on the outskirts of Tegucigalpa, in Honduras. She can barely afford food for him and his sister, Belky, who is 7. Lourdes, 24, scrubs other people’s laundry in a muddy river. She fills a wooden box with gum and crackers and cigarettes, and she finds a spot where she can squat on a dusty sidewalk next to the downtown Pizza Hut and sell the items to passersby. The sidewalk is Enrique’s playground.

Read the rest of this story here.

Column: Pulitzer Prizes

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Pulitzer Prizes—the best of the press

By Ted Pease
©1999

I don’t know yet who has won the 1999 Pulitzer Prizes — only a handful of people do. When the winners are announced tomorrow, most Americans won’t notice or care.

But at newspapers from Ames, Iowa, to New York City, people whose normal workplace demeanor is professional detachment will start wandering into the newsroom tomorrow just before 3 p.m. Eastern time, idly trying, and failing, to affect nonchalance. Everyone knows newspaper people don’t care about anything, but they care about this — and they should. So should the rest of us.

Newspaper people cultivate a pretty impervious callousness about what others think about them. They have to. Too often that affected insouciance comes out as arrogance or cynicism, but that detachment is just a psychological and practical defense that goes with the territory in a business where most of your customers either hate what you do or ignore it completely. Let me give you a little secret: Get past the affect and you will find social workers and priests beneath the professional crust. By definition, journalists are do-gooders. Once a year, whether they want to or not, they let themselves admit how deeply they care about what they do.

So tomorrow is a big day in American journalism.

The announcement will come in New York from George Rupp, the president of Columbia University, in the Pulitzer World Room on the third floor of the venerable Journalism Building, where Joseph Pulitzer’s enduring shrine to the very best and the very brightest in press performance resides. When the winner are named, a very few newspaper newsrooms around the country will explode with champagne and an uncharacteristic partisan joy that for that moment will link some of the most legendary and least known journalists of our time. Other newsrooms will be gloomy, because they didn’t win. But overall, there will be a certain warm satisfaction, a reaffirmation that journalistic excellence still lives.

A Pulitzer is journalism’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize — a gold medal in the press Olympics, newspaperdom’s Congressional Medal of Honor. When he died in 1911, Joseph Pulitzer, the legendary publisher of the New York World and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, created both a school to train journalists at the university level, and a yardstick to measure and reward the journalistic excellence he thought a democratic society deserved. The first prizes were awarded in 1917.

This past March 1, some 80 eminent journalists and scholars gathered in the Pulitzer World Room at Columbia University to set in motion tomorrow’s announcement. The jurors’ task was to cull the hundreds of entries for the 1999 Pulitzer Prizes in journalism. By some clerical error, I was among them.

Over three long days, the juries reviewed nearly 2,000 nominees for 14 journalism prizes. In addition, Pulitzers are awarded in seven arts and letters categories: fiction, drama, history, biography or autobiography, poetry, nonfiction and music.

The 14 journalism award categories are: public service (which is the ultimate gold medal), local breaking news, investigative reporting, explanatory reporting, beat reporting, national affairs, international affairs, feature writing, distinguished commentary, distinguished criticism, editorial writing, editorial cartooning, spot news photography, and feature photography.

At the end of the three days of deliberation in March, each journalism jury sent forward three finalists plus three alternates. Last week, the 19 luminaries of the Pulitzer Board convened to make the final decisions, which will come out tomorrow.

It is an enormous honor for a college professor from an ag school in northern Utah to be part of the process. I won’t name my fellow jurors, but they included top editors and publishers from some of the best newspapers and news and wire services in the country. And they took their responsibilities very, very seriously.

There is no fee for jurors. They pay their own way, taking four days or more off from their own jobs to do this one. I can tell you because I saw it with my own eyes that these are high-powered people, far from their own newsrooms and offices and responsibilities, with their sleeves rolled up, coffee cups in a stack, reading, taking notes, evaluating and haggling for 10 hours a day for three days. When you get right down to it, judging the Pulitzers is not as glamorous as you might think. But it’s heady stuff.

My jury was charged with deciding the three best columnists of 1999. There were seven of us, expanded from the usual five because of the large volume of nominations in the distinguished commentary category: 196 entries, each consisting of a nomination form and letter, and 10 columns. Once I got started on the enormous stack in the middle of our table, I thought to myself that I had to be crazy — I’d just finished grading 60-something USU student papers, so what the heck was I doing there doing more grading? But — no offense to my students — the quality of these term papers was a bit higher than I’m used to.

The stack of nominees included the usual suspects for a Pulitzer Party — journalistic icons, names everyone would recognize from the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, LA Times, Chicago Tribune — along with names you’ve never heard of.

The goal, for me, was to find writing that explained a piece of the world to readers in new and insightful and powerful ways. I made myself a list of what I was looking for: 1) powerful, evocative, descriptive, factual, passionate writing that moved me; 2) content that was universal, issues cutting across many lives and outlooks and cultures and communities; 3) a strong individual voice that reflected life and actual human beings in an identifiable community; 4) clear objectives that were achieved by the column’s end; 5) effective arguments, with support; and 6) writing writing writing.

By Day 3, we had culled the heap in the middle of the table to 24 entries, each with at least four positive votes. Some of these were quickly cut on the second read — although excellent stuff, they couldn’t muster the level of support among the seven jurors of some other entries. I hope someday these people learn that they reached such an elite group, because their work was wonderful. They should know we thought so.

The final list of three came surprisingly easy. After three days of close reading — seven of us scutinizing 196 files and nomination letters and 1,960 individual columns, and engaging in energetic haggling and energizing give-and-take — it took us just two ballots to agree on the final best of the best.

For me, the experience left me fatigued but proud of the profession. There is a lot of great work being done out there, and seeing the diligence that the juries brought to the task of evaluating it, busy people volunteering their time and energy to decide on the best the press has to offer — it all reaffirmed my faith in the value of journalism and the quality of American newspapers.

This column appeared in the Logan (Utah) Herald-Journal 3/28/99

The Final BIG Stories: The Issue and the In-Depth Feature

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In-Depth Stories: Features & Issues

Let’s talk a little about the two in-depth story assignments, The Feature/Profile and The Issue Story.

These stories—weighted more heavily than the stories from earlier in the semester—are “in-depth” because they involve more complex issues, require more reporting and sources, and run longer (say, 1,500 words or more) than the standard weekly story assignments. They are opportunities for you to delve deeply into topics that interest you, and into complex issues that require considerable research on your part in order to make them understandable for readers.

The In-Depth Feature or Profile

The in-depth feature (or profile) is a “softer” story that gives the reader an up-close and personal perspective on a place, event or person. These stories require subjects that are interesting and evocative, a lot of input from sources, description and writer insight. These stories are more like literature than news, but are still about real-world places/things/people, and based in fact.

For examples of these kinds of in-depth stories, see the website for the Pulitzer Prizes, the best of the best of American journalistic nonfiction writing. The website is an incredibly rich resource for writers, and worth spending time perusing.

The Pulitzers are awarded annually in (now) 14 categories of writing, cartooning and photography, plus six categories of fiction, drama, music and literature. Hungarian-born newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer created the prizes (and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, one of the nation’s very best) in his will to promote and reward excellence in journalism. Click here for that history. The first Pulitzer Prizes were awarded in 1917. This year’s awards will be announced, as usual, in New York in April.

(Professor Pease was honored to serve as a Pulitzer Prize juror—rare for an academic—in 1998-1999, and wrote a column about it.)

For our final feature/profile story, it might be worthwhile looking at what the Pulitzer juries have thought were the best of American journalism. Click here Gene Weingarten of The Washington Post, the best feature story of 2008. Also browse the feature category on the Pulitzer site to see what kinds of things have been considered the best of our craft (just click on the year, listed across the top of the page, for all the categories, and navigate to that year’s winners).

To get “depth,” the writer needs to get inside her/his topic, understand—know—everything about the subject and what makes it tick. A lot of detail is required: sources, interviews, observation and description.

For this assignment, students may elect either a feature story on a thing—a place (the milk line at the Gossner’s Cheese factory, the counter at Angie’s restaurant, the Beaver Mountain lift...), an event (the annual Girl Scout Jamboree, the weekly demolition derby, this weekend's man/dog 5k fun run...) or an organization (the people of the Utah Save The Whale or Great Old Broads group...). The goal is not just to write about the topic, but to show the reader its essence, some basic truth and reality about it. You must transport the reader to your topic, help her see and hear and smell it, paint a word-picture that will make the thing real for a reader.

Alternatively, for this assignment you can write a personality profile on an individual, focusing on everything there is to know about a person, internal and external. For a profile, the reporter (obviously) interviews the individual—multiple times, if possible. You spend time with your subject, watching him/her work, interact with the world and other people, do his thing and, in the process, reveal essential truths about who he or she is. In addition to interviewing the subject, you also will seek out everything you can about your person—interview friends and enemies, co-workers, family, examine the physical environment in which the person lives and works for what it can tell you about your subject, read her/his writings, study his/her artwork, listen to his/her music...whatever. The goal is to paint a fully rounded word-picture that tells the reader some essence, central truths about your subject: Who she really is, what makes her tick, her strengths, weaknesses, fears, hopes, dreams. Some examples: Brent the Bicycle Guy, the owner of the greasy-spoon restaurant, the mailman, a fishing/hunting guide, a yoga instructor, a college professor.

The Issue Story

The other major assignment is an issue story. These are stories that take a large, macro, global MONSTER topic (a disease, a social issue like teen pregnancy) and discussed its implications and presence on a local, micro level. For example, the government has just released a major study of (pick a topic: immigration); what does this mean here in Cache Valley? You’ll have reports on the initial macro study, will find state of Utah stats that relate, local county data, and find individuals—people, programs, agencies—to focus on and to provide a human face for your issue.

When I was working for the Associated Press in Arkansas about a bazillion years ago, a New York-based organization called the Guttenmacher Institute released its annual report on teen pregnancy. The report included national and state-by-state stats; in Arkansas, 22 percent of all babies born statewide had been to mothers younger than 17. The story I wrote included the macro info on the national and state situation re. teen pregnancy, but it focused on a 17-year-old mother (of four!!!), and doctors and nurses who work with teenaged mothers. The story took its headline from a doctor’s quote, about “Babies Having Babies.”

Not surprisingly, the Pulitzer Prizes reserve their top award for stories that deal with these kinds of global issues and that put a human face on the issue. The 2008 Pulitzer Award for Public Service—the top award—went to a team at the Washington Post headed by Dana Priest, that examined awful conditions for returning Iraq war soldiers at Walter Reed Hospital, the nation’s premier veterans medical facility. If you read just the first few paragraphs of the team’s opening story—the first of 10—you will see that the approach is to focus at the micro level (a wounded soldier and his substandard room), building into some quotes to help the reader “see” the story, and then a couple of grafs that serve as nut grafs to tell the reader the scope and “So what?” of the series.

Of COURSE I expect Pulitzer-caliber work of you for these two final stories! Lacking that, I expect at least that you will have thought long and carefully about both your feature/profile, and what about your subject will really engage your reader; and about your issue—something important, that affects people’s lives, and presented in a way that portrays real people whose lives are affected by your topic.

Please pitch me your feature/profile and issue story topics in person or via email. What do you want to do? What's the answer to the reader’s “So What?” question? Whom will you interview? and why them? How will you get to the central core of the story—do you even know what it is???

Questions?

Column: Old Dog Gone

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Goodbye, Old Hound
RIP: Eddie (Edward R. Murrow the lesser), 1988-2001

By Ted Pease
© 2001

Right before our eyes, the Old Dog is dying. A devoted friend of nearly 13 years — that’s 91 in people years — Eddie’s lights are going out.

How it hurts to watch him go.

Eddie’s a patient and sweet Golden Retriever. This is the kind of dog that has epitomized “unconditional love” ever since he found us back in Ohio in 1988. All his life he has gently and gratefully accepted whatever came, kind of sloppy and pretty clumsy, but always painfully trusting.

Now that he has to die, he’s doing it with a grace that I hope I remember when it’s my turn.

He’s dying. No more stupid human tricks, like the birthday hats we inflicted on him, or the reindeer antlers at Christmas. He’s a pleaser, and even as the strength ebbs in him, the will to please glows strong. But we can see him slipping away.

It’s cancer, of course. And how ironic: He’s not been sick a day in his life. While the other two dogs went through surgeries and therapy and broken limbs and convalescence, Eddie always soldiered on. He was not an exciting dog. But he has been part of our family since there has been a family. When he goes — any day now, I think — there will be a hole in our house you can drive an Alpo delivery truck through.

At the final moment, I think Eddie will look at us apologetically, because he’ll feel that he’s somehow failing us.

At least he’s not in pain. That’s what the vet says. You have to love a veterinarian who tears up as she delivers bad news. The tumors, she says, are growing and spreading. When it comes, the end will be fast. He’ll just bleed away and be gone.

He’s obviously not hurting, and that’s a comfort. Since he was a puppy, Eddie did a thing we call “circus dog” when he sees his dinner coming. He jumps all four feet right off the ground, grinning and wagging like only a sweet hound can. These days he’s still jumping, but not quite off the ground anymore. When there’s no more circus dog, we’ll know Eddie’s about done, because he loves his kibbles.

He’s endured a lifetime of indignities with grace. His first veterinarian suggested cosmetic surgery to correct his sometimes awesome drooling ability: “Eddie has defective lips.” Imagine. Our daughter, when she was maybe 8, was fighting with her sister: “You’re as dumb as Eddie!” she said. It took him years not to hide in the bathtub, and even now he’s most comfortable under a table or in a corner.

But even if he wasn’t the brightest bulb, Eddie was a sweet boy who always accepted whatever came with sloppy and genuine gratitude.

We and Eddie found each other when we were in grad school. It was dumb to get a dog — grad students can’t afford to feed themselves, so the last thing we needed was the responsibility for a big dog. But one Sunday in Athens, Ohio, we had a weird spasm while reading the classified ads, went out and brought home a beefy 12-week-old puppy, wet, smelly and trembling.

He had been battered as a puppy, I think, and was scared of everything. He sat on Brenda’s lap on the living room floor for two hours while I went to the grocery. When he finally felt safe enough to move, he peed in the corner of the kitchen, sniffed at the kibbles and new puppy bowl I’d bought, and hid in the bath tub. That was his safe place for two years.

Last summer, another of our dogs died, also of cancer. Eddie and his black Lab younger sister, Lucy, were bewildered by the sudden hole in their lives. They were needy for reassurance, and spent a few weeks lying on each other for company. Every time we moved, they were there. Now we worry about Lucy, herself a decrepit 11 years old: What will she do when her best friend is no longer there to flop down beside.

Old Ed has had a good, happy and healthy life. The sudden lump on his back a few weeks ago led to two surgeries. Now, amazingly fast, the tumors are back. The vet thinks they are everywhere, and the ugly shaved patch on his back is now ringed with hard, evil lumps. He’s not in pain, I think, but time is clearly short. And when he comes from the water dish to lay his dripping defective lips in my lap, I can’t push him away.

Our friend Mark says he defines periods of his life by his pets. He still can’t talk about a cat he lost in the 1980s. He’s right. This is the end of the Eddie Era, which began more than one-quarter of my own life ago. I know that we’ll always mark the day Eddie died. There won’t be any more dumb birthday dog tricks, but he’s had a good run.

He is a sweet old poop, half blind, stiff, unflaggingly devoted. Even now, as the tumors eat him from the inside, Eddie perks up at a tennis ball. He still lies in exactly the wrong place in the kitchen, where we’ll trip over him. He still breathes eager dog-breath in my face when I’m in bed. He still twitches and chases rabbits in his sleep.

Not much longer to go now. We’ll miss him. Good-bye, Old Dog.
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Story Idea—Bottled Water

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Thirst Quencher Exercise
Drink Preferences: Bottled or Tap Water, Soda, Milk…
(From Professor Melvin Mencher)

Here’s a story idea that combines interviewing about a social trend and personal preferences with (gasp!) mathematics.

What do people drink when they’re thirsty or want a drink to go along with a meal?

The Drinking Data
The first two columns below compare average annual consumption in gallons of 10 years ago with current consumption. The third column lists the percentage change in the decade. You could ask your students to derive the percentages. The figures are from the Beverage Digest (2008). (Note: Blogspot doesn't do tabs, so these numbers are crammed together, separated by slashes.)

Today/ 10 Years Ago/ Percentage Change
Soft drinks: 51/55/-7.3%
Water: 48/42/+14.3%
• Tap water: 27/31/-12.9%
• Bottled water: 21/11/+90.9%
Beer: 22/24/-8.3%
Milk: 20/22/-9.1%
Coffee: 16/20/-11.1%
Juices: 8/9/-20%
Sports drinks: 5/2/+150%
Others: 10/9/+66.7%

Summary
The bottled water industry says its latest figures show bottled water is on equal footing with tap water, 27 gallons a year. If you want to substitute 27 for the 21 figure above, the percentage change would then be +145 percent.

For the story, the significant increase is in bottled water. Although it is 2,800 times more expensive than tap water—$1,400 a year compared with 50 cents for tap water—the cost deters few. Only lately have bottled-water users seemed concerned about the effect on the environment of millions of discarded water bottles. Only 25 percent of them are recycled. Manufacturing the plastic bottles consumes 1.5 million barrels of petroleum a year.

Another glaringly obvious change in these data is the 150% increase in sports drinks—GatorAde and all the rest. Why? What’s in those things? And what about all those plastic bottles?

Assignment
Ask those who prefer bottled water why they buy it when, studies show, it is not as carefully monitored as local tap water. Some tap water is so pure—Boston, New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, Ore.—it isn’t filtered. Forty percent of all bottled water is filtered tap water.
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