ASSIGNMENT INSTRUCTIONS

• Write a newsworthy professional profile on a journalist or another person of your choosing.
• As with every assignment, the topic you focus on here should be newsworthy and include the following:
  • 500-800 words
  • A clear angle
  • An engaging lead
  • Distinct structure (Ideas flow logically from one to the next)
  • AP style
  • Your main source, your subject, can be a journalist or any other professional of your choosing. Try to find at least one secondary source, even if it’s another article
• The assignment will be graded based on the criteria above as well as your overall voice, tone and writing style.

You profile should be about any professional of your choice. It could be with professor, doctor, nurse, engineer, carpenter, journalist — anything really. If you’d like to interview a journalist, I’d be happy to help you find someone to talk to. 

As always, there should be some kind of news hook — anything to make it feel current — and then the article should be about this person and what they do for a living. So, for example, if I were to interview someone in the oil industry, I might peg it to this news about Shell and how they say their oil production is going to fall every year: https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/11/business/shell-oil-production-peak/index.html. Then I’d focus the article around how their career may be changing in light of this. If I interviewed a journalist, I might talk to them about attacks on the media and “fake news” and how it affects their work.

As for examples, the piece we read last week on Jorge Ramos is a perfect example of a profile that focuses on someone’s professional life (though of course it’s much longer than what you’ll submit). A couple others: 

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/14/magazine/cooks-illustrateds-christopher-kimball.html?pagewanted=all

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/07/23/the-strongest-man-in-the-world