Overview

In this scenario, you’ll interview someone in order to write an article about him or her for a magazine or newspaper (print or online). The subject of your profile can be anyone. Although you may be most familiar with interviews of celebrities, nearly everyone has interesting stories to tell about their lives and feelings.

The profile piece you write can be humorous, informative, dramatic, touching, or inspiring. It could be all of those things. As part of your preparation, you’ll identify a specific publication that sometimes runs articles like this. The destination can be a mass-market magazine such as The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Time, FHM, or Vogue. Or it could be a more specialized or narrowly targeted publication such as the left-leaning Mother Jones or the music recording–oriented Tape Op (each of these publications has a website where you can find examples of profiles). You could also choose to target a local publication such as a school or community newspaper, magazine, or website (all of which often include profiles of local people).

Before the interview, you’ll need to do background research on the person you choose to write about so you can create good interview questions or prompts. The background information will also be important for the article, where you can use it to paint a fuller picture of the person for the reader. You’ll also need to do research on the publication where you’d like to place your article to get a sense of what types of work it publishes, including issues of rough word count, type of language used, and other factors that might make your article more attractive. The article you write should use the interview as raw material, but it should not simply be a list of questions and answers. Contextualize that raw material with background information, descriptions of the physical surroundings, or other sensory information you gathered.

You may choose to include photos or to lay out your article so that it looks like a professional publication (either print or online). To create something more visually interesting than a simple text document in a word-processing program, use a print page design application such as InDesign or a website design program such as Dreamweaver.