Journalism 2015: Features Writing
What is a profile? A "profile feature" is a newspaper article that explores the
background and character of a particular person (or group). The focus should be on a
news angle or a single aspect of the subject's personal or professional life. The article
should begin with the reason the subject is newsworthy at this time, and should be
based (not exclusively) on an extensive interview with the subject.
Research & Interviewing: Biographical material is important, but should not be
overemphasized: the biography is background to the news. Readers should be allowed to
better understand the subject by seeing this person in the context of his or her interests
and career, educational and family background.
 When reporting a profile feature article, observe your surroundings carefully.
Pay attention to your subject's habits and mannerisms. Subtle clues like posture,
tone of voice and word choice can all, when presented to readers, contribute to a
fuller and more accurate presentation of the interview subject.
 When interviewing, encourage your subject to open up and express significant
thoughts, feelings or opinions. Do so by asking open-ended questions that are
well-planned. Make sure to research the subject of your profile before beginning
your interview. This will help you to maintain focus during the conversation and
to ask questions that will elicit compelling responses.
 The article should open with the subject's connection to the news event and
should deal later with birth, family, education, career and hobbies, unless one of
those happens to be the focus of the story.
 Interview someone other than your profile subject, representing a variety of
perspectives. Ask them for telling anecdotes. You don't have to quote, or even
mention, all of these people in your article. But each may provide you with
information that will help you ask better questions of your profile subject, or of
the next person you interview.
 Profile features should include the major elements of hard news stories, but
should also provide readers with details help to capture the essence of the person
you are profiling. Contextual information should clearly show readers why the
profile subject you have chosen is relevant and interesting.
 Since features are typically reported and written over a much longer period of
time than event-driven news, they should be carefully researched and
supported with as much background material as possible.
Ledes: Profile feature ledes are often more creative than news leads. They don't
always need to contain the standard "five w's (and h)": who, what, when, where, why and
how. (These elements should, however, be aggregated somewhere in your article in what
has come to be known as a "nut graf," the paragraph that clearly explains to readers who
your profile is about and why this person is interesting.) A profile feature lede can take
one of many forms. One is a "delayed lede," in which a person is introduced before his or
her relevance is revealed.
 An example:As a young girl growing up on the South Side of Chicago,
Mae C. Jemison watched telecasts of the Gemini and Apollo spaceflights
and knew that that was her destiny. No matter that all the astronauts were
male and white and that she was female and black. She simply knew she
would be a space traveler.Now a 35-year-old doctor and engineer, Dr.
Journalism 2015: Features Writing
Jemison has realized her dream, launching into orbit yesterday as one of
the shuttle Endeavor's sever-member crew. In the process she has become
the first African-American woman to go into space. ...
Organization: When structuring your story, don't feel tied to the "inverted
pyramid" style of writing, in which the most important information is placed in the first
paragraph and proceeds retrogressively from there.
 Consider weaving background material with details and quotes, and when
choosing an order in which to present your information, move
thematically rather than chronologically.
 Don't end your article with a conclusion. Consider saving a particularly
resonant quote for the last sentence. This way your article will end with a
voice the reader may be left hearing long after he or she has finished your
story.
PROFILE (FEATURES): A GREAT EXAMPLE
Inside the Mansion—and Mind— of Kim Dotcom, the Most Wanted Man on the Net
Wired
By Charles Graeber
10.18.12 |
Photo: Wilk
Please Choose One of the Following Statements:

A. Kim Dotcom is not a pirate. He’s a hero. The savior of my online liberties. A
visionary digital entrepreneur. His company Megaupload was a legitimate data-storage
business used by hundreds of millions of individuals and by employees of NASA, US
Central Command, even the FBI. The raid on his New Zealand home was excessive and
illegal—shock-and-awe bullshit. Hollywood is terrified by the digital future, and an
innocent paid the price. Kim is a martyr. But Kim will triumph.
Journalism 2015: Features Writing
You’d like him, he’s cool.

B. Kim Dotcom is a pirate. A megalomaniacal gangsta clown. An opportunistic and
calculating career criminal. His Megaupload enterprise willfully made hundreds of
millions of dollars off stolen movies, songs, videogames, books, and software. And, oh
yeah, he couldn’t be more obnoxious about it.
He wanted Wired to write a nice story about him, so he manipulated its writer by
providing exclusive access, and even a few tears, in hopes of a puff piece. But Kim is a
criminal. He knows he’s a criminal. Like any pirate, the only freedoms he really cares
about are the ones he can exploit to make himself rich. The rest is all PR.
If you think he’s cool, you don’t know him.

C. Kim Dotcom is rich enough to work however and wherever he wants. And what he
wants is to work from bed.
His bed of choice is a remarkable piece of custom Swedish craftsmanship made by a company
called Hästens. Each one takes some 160 hours to produce and is signed by a master bed-maker
who lays out the most perfect matrix of horsehair, cotton, flax, and wool. Price after custom
framing: $103,000. Kim has three such beds in his New Zealand mansion, one of which faces a
series of monitors and hard drives and piles of wires and is flanked on either side by lamps that
look like, and may well be, chromed AK-47s. This is Kim’s “work bed” and serves as his office.
It was here that he returned in the early morning of January 20, 2012, after a long night spent on
his music album, one of his many side projects.
Kim had spent the previous seven hours down the road at Roundhead Studios, laying down beats
with songwriter Mario “Tex” James and Black Eyed Peas producer Printz Board in a studio
owned by Crowded House frontman Neil Finn. They finished around 4:30 am, and Kim slid into
the backseat of his Mercedes S-Class for the ride back to his mansion. Soon after leaving the
parking lot, Kim noticed headlights behind them. He said to his driver, “I think we’re being
followed.”
They pulled into Kim’s rented palace around dawn. His wife and children were long asleep in
another wing. Kim walked to his upstairs chambers, showered and changed into his customary
all-black sleeping costume, grabbed his customary chilled Fiji water from the upstairs fridge, and
settled before the monitors of his work bed. Then he heard the noise.
A low, wavering bass, it seemed to be coming from outside. Kim couldn’t tell—the cavernous
stone labyrinth of rooms swallowed and scattered sound, and
the thick velvet blackout curtains blocked out everything else.
Kim guessed it was his helicopter. He didn’t bother with
details, he had a staff for that, but he did know that VIPs from
the entertainment world were expected in from LA in
celebration of his 38th birthday. Maybe they’d arrived early
and Roy, his pilot, had been dispatched to meet them. A
moment later the helicopter theory was confirmed by the
sound of rocks from the limestone drive raining against the
windows. (obscenity) Roy! He’d been told not to land too
Journalism 2015: Features Writing
near—the thought was interrupted by a boom, echoing and close.
This noise was coming from the other side of his office door. It was heavy hardwood several
inches thick, secured by stout metal bolts in the stone casement. Kim struggled to his feet as the
door shook and heaved on its hinges. Someone or something was trying to break through. Now
Kim heard other noises, shouts and bangs and the unmistakable stomping of boots on stairs.
Intruders were in the house. Kim Dotcom realized he was under attack.
Across an ocean, hours before Operation Takedown began, the US Department of Justice had
already tipped off a select group of journalists about the raid’s planned highlights. If you know
nothing else about Kim Dotcom, about the federal case against him and his former online
business, Megaupload, you’ve probably heard about the raid. The story played out like a
Hollywood blockbuster. And it was a great story.
The scene: New Zealand. Lush and Green and Freaking Far Away. It’s the Canada of Australia,
Wales in a Hawaiian shirt, a Xanadu habitat for Hobbit and emu.
And harbor home to the villain: Kim Dotcom, né Kim Schmitz, aka Tim Vestor, Kim Tim Jim
Vestor, Kimble, and Dr. Evil. A classic comic book baddie millionaire, an ex-con expatriate
German ex-hacker lording over his own personal Pirate Bay just 30 minutes north of Auckland.
Kim Dotcom was presented as a big, bad man, larger-than-life, larger than his 6′ 7″, perhaps 350pound frame. We saw him posed with guns and yachts and fancy cars. We watched him drive his
nitrox-fueled Mega Mercedes in road rallies and on golf courses, throwing fake gang signs at rap
moguls and porn stars, making it rain with $175 million in illicit dotcom booty.
His alleged 50-petabyte pirate ship was Megaupload.com, a massive vessel carrying, at its peak,
50 million passengers a day, a full 4 percent of global Internet traffic. Megaupload was a free
online storage locker, a cloud warehouse for files too bulky for email. It generated an estimated
$25 million a year in revenue from ads and brought in another $150 million through its paid,
faster, unlimited Premium service.
Kim, they say, was like Jabba the Hutt, running a bazaar of copyright criminality with impunity
from his Kiwi Tatooine.
The DOJ maintains that the legitimate storage business was only a front, like a Mafia pork store;
the real money was made out back, where Megaupload was a mega-swapmeet for some $500
million worth of pirated material, including movies, TV shows, music, books, videogames, and
software. Kim, they contend, was the Jabba the Hutt-like presence running this grand bazaar of
copyright criminality with impunity from his Kiwi Tatooine, protected by laser break beams and
guards and guns, CCTV and infrared and even escape pods—including a helicopter and highperformance sports cars. The FBI also believed Kim possessed a special portable device that
would wipe his servers all across the globe, destroying the evidence. They called this his
doomsday button.
Operation Takedown was carried out by armed New Zealand special police and monitored by the
FBI via video link. Descriptions of the raid varied from one news outlet to another, but most
included the cops’ dramatic helicopter arrival on the expansive Dotcom Mansion lawn and their
struggles with a security system fit for a Mafia don.
Journalism 2015: Features Writing
We read that police were forced to cut their way into Dotcom’s panic room, where they found
him cowering near a sawed-off shotgun. That same day, similar raids were under way in eight
other countries where Megaupload had servers or offices.
This was justice on an epically entertaining scale, topped by a final cherry of schadenfreude: the
rich fat bad man humbled and humiliated, the boastful pirate king brought down. He was cuffed
and put in jail, his booty seized, his business scuttled upon the reefs of anti-racketeering laws. If
all went as planned, he and his six generals would be extradited to the US to face a Virginia judge
and up to 55 years each in prison. The message was, if it could happen to him, it could happen to
anyone. Look upon these works, ye BitTorrenters of Dark Knight trilogies, sneak thieves of 50
Cent, and despair in your pirate bays. Justice was served, the end, roll credits. Yes, it was a great
story.
The only problem was, it wasn’t quite true.