America’s Best Newspaper Writing – Week 2
Chapter 7: The Profile and Feature Story
By Hannah Williams
According to America’s Best Newspaper Writing, a feature writer has two main goals: (1) “to find the human being behind the celebrity” and (2) “to discover what is worth celebrating in the life of uncommonly common men and women.” Suskind, Elliott, Keller, Weingarten and Bragg all claimed Pulitzer Prizes for their exemplary feature writing.
“Against All Odds: In a Rough City, Top Students Struggle to Learn – and Escape”By Ron Suskind – The Wall Street Journal – 1995 Pulitzer Prize Winner –Feature Writing
Suskind captures the challenges facing gifted students at Ballou Senior High who must struggle for both their education and their lives by profiling 16-year-old honor student Cedric Jennings.
“A Muslim Leader in Brooklyn, Reconciling 2 Worlds” By Andrea Elliott – The New York Times – 2007 Pulitzer Prize Winner – Feature Writing
Elliot describes and Egyptian imam’s transition to life in the U.S. and the challenges he confronts as the leader of a Brooklyn Masque in a land without many spiritual guides.
“A Wicked Wind Takes Aim: How do you outrun the sky? On a fateful day in April, the people of Utica bore the brunt of the awesome power of a tornado.” By Julia Keller – The Chicago Tribune – 2005 Pulitzer Prize Winner – Feature Writing
Keller retells the events leading up to a tornado in Utica.
“Pearls before Breakfast” By Gene Weingarten – The Washington Post – 2008 Pulitzer Prize Winner – Feature Writing
Weingarten has an interesting take on the feature story, literally making the celebrity a noncelebrity, staging world renown violinist Joshua Bell as a street musician at L’Enfant Plaza off the D.C. metro during rush hour, taping the scene and following up on people’s reactions. Both the scene and the story are excellently crafted and surprising.
“Terror in Oklahoma City: At Ground Zero” By Rick Bragg – The New York Times – 1995 Pulitzer Prize Winner –Feature Writing
Bragg recounts the Oklahoma City Bombing in the immediate aftermath of the attack, showcasing how one can straddle the line between reporting and patriotism in a situation of national crisis.
Ron Suskind’s Pulitzer Prize-winning piece about inner-city honors students catches readers’ attention from the first graph, with a shocking statement followed by an even more shocking revelation that the opening action is not indeed shocking at Ballou Senior High: “Recently, a student was shot dead by a classmate during lunch period outside Frank W. Ballou Senior High. It didn’t come as much of a surprise to anyone at the school, in this city’s most crime-infested ward.” The matter-of-fact response to this atrocity hooks the reader.
Suskind again successfully identifies the extraordinary in the ordinary, fulfilling the latter of the two basic tasks of a great profiler/feature writer: qualifying 16-year-old honor student Cedric Jennings as: “The high-school junior with the perfect grades has big dreams: He wants to go to Massachusetts Institute of Technology.” Anywhere else in the country, and Cedric would be a dime a dozen; at Ballou, he is the one to watch, the one who has a chance to make it out.
Suskind does not miss these detailed intricacies; he uses an em dash effectively to set off the information he feels is the most counter-intuitive and revealing. For example: “Every day after school, after double-locking the door behind him, he would study, dream of becoming an engineer living in a big house — and gaze at the dealers just outside his window stashing their cocaine in the alley.” While yes, it’s odd that Cedric double-locks his door to do his homework, it’s even more odd that he watches drug deals from his window.
Suskind uses irony effectively, infusing an otherwise seemingly tragic story with some humor. “At school, though, Cedric’s blatant studiousness seems to attract nothing but abuse.” “In a filthy boys room reeking of urine, Delante Coleman, a 17-year-old junior known as “Head,” is describing life at the top.” The humor motivates readers to keep reading, even when confronted with a heart-wrenching scene such as Phillip’s vain hope that his family would attend his tap performance: “His throat seems to catch, and he shakes his head. ‘Yeah,’ he says, ‘I’ll find out where they are, why they couldn’t come.’ He tries to force a smile, but only manages a grimace. ‘I’ll find out later.’”
Andrea Elliott’s 2007 Pulitzer Prize winner rides the middle line between humanizing a celebrity and celebrating a human – it familiarizes the foreign. Elliott chronicles the transition of an imam from Islamic Egypt to the secular U.S.. collecting countless details and revealing them at precisely the moment when the reader needs a boost, a relatable context to keep going. The piece builds upward; Elliot sets a base of the imam’s life and the basic tenets of Islam and adds to it the towering responsibilities thrust upon him. The additive results is a relatable understanding of being overwhelmed: “Virtually overnight, he became an Islamic judge and nursery school principal, a matchmaker and marriage counselor, a 24-hour hot line on all things Islamic.”
The very personal story of the imam does indeed become more universal when peppered with concrete examples of the demands on his time, and ultimately the sheer workload that makes him collapse. Elliot does a great job of building and balancing this tension until it snaps, making for an interesting story, but the reader also learns a great deal about Islam through the piece; effortless education.
The opening paragraph sets the tone for Julia Keller’s entire piece. A sense of short, punctuated, urgency that will propel the narrative regarding the destructive power of the Utica tornado that would manifest itself in ten seconds: “Ten seconds. Count it: One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten. Ten seconds was roughly how long it lasted. Nobody had a stopwatch, nothing can be proven definitively, but that’s the consensus. The tornado that swooped through Utica at 6:09 p.m. April 20 took some 10 seconds to do what it did. Ten seconds is barely a flicker. It’s a long, deep breath. It’s no time at all. It’s an eternity.”
Furthermore, Keller utilizes effective foreshadowing. By revealing that the tornado killed eight people, she forces the reader to keep reading to find out how and why. It works similarly to the Truman Capote’s story, In Cold Blood, which begins by disclosing to the reader that all told, four gunshots end six lives. Sparking the reader’s curiosity by divulging the ending without revealing the entire how and why is a good strategy for effective story telling. She repeatedly uses this formula (and Capote’s language) as she introduces new characters to the drama, balancing he tension of the brewing storm and pending tragedy with information regarding tornados. Balance, as employed by both Keller and Elliot, is essential.
Keller also remains authorial story-telling power by using quotes sparingly, only for dialogue, favoring instead telling the story in her own words based off the accounts of others. This authorial decision empowers Keller to retell the story effectively.
Gene Weingarten’s piece about violinist Joshua Bell is an anomaly for the category of feature writing, as it is indeed more of a staged experiment then traditional reporting; however, the colloquial style and reactionary interviews make this almost painful description of a world class musician being ignored by the masses very intriguing. Bell’s own sense of humor about the situation adds to the overall story. Through his multimedia reporting, Weingarten achieves the first goal of feature writing – finding the human behind the celebrity.
Writing in response to a tragedy seems to be an especially difficult task. As a reporter one wants to remain objective but not harsh, empathetic but not overly defensive. Rick Bragg’s story about the aftermath of the Oklahoma City Bombing carefully and compellingly walks this line. He utilizes the essential journalistic skill of listening and allows the people of Oklahoma City to tell their own story, without intruding too much, nor being too distant.
The profile and feature writers above, and those highlighted in America’s Best Newspaper Writing, skillfully contextualize people and events to write compelling stories that are still informative and interesting. Enlisting the techniques they use will help any reporter write more effective features.
