No pat answers These excerpts are from a talk about profile writing that Free Press reporter reporter Sheryl James gave to newsroom staffers.
Profiles are the most difficult stories to write.
I routinely fear that the profiles I write have not met my own expectations. Profiles are difficult to write for several reasons, and probably the main difficulty is in the actual writing. Once readers know that they're reading a profile, I think there's great potential for the reader to fall off, because there isn t the natural mechanism that you'll find in a news story to get the reader through, and I'm not sure that's always there with profiles. So, you need to think about that when you're selecting your profile subject and when you're writing it. Your biggest decision is your choice of a subject.