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.

• • •

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.