David Von Drehle, a senior writer on the staff of The Washington Post, just spoke to our group of political journos about doing a better candidate profile.
To start off, Von Drehle listed three things readers want to know about their candidates: policy, campaign, and character. Or, if the reader is Alex Trebek: Where does this person stand on the issues? What are this person's chances of winning? Who is this person, and what will he be like in office?
The challenge is to address these three questions without inducing coma in the reader.
The way to do this, Von Drehle said, is to go back to classical models of Aristotelian theory, which posited three time-tested elements of writing that can serve any candidate profile well:
- The beginning.
- The middle.
- The end.
Write a story, in other words. Don't aim for a comprehensive biography of a person, aim for a focused biography of a fact about that person. Find a detail about a candidate, and attack it, from its origin to its conclusion, with an absorbing tale. Aim for the conclusion of the story, and along the way, hang tidbits of biography.
As an example of a successful candidate profile, Von Drehle chose this one, by Laura Blumenfeld, about Bob Dole's hands.
Bob Dole's disabled hands, Von Drehle said, had merited a paragraph in every one of ten million boring stories about the candidate. But other writers had always considered them a mere detail in a biography. Blumenfeld made her story a biography of a detail, to fascinating effect.
The best part, Von Drehle said, is that all the biographical info is in there. The story covers Dole's strengths and weaknesses, his resilience, his unwillingness to accept (or, by inference, give) sympathy, all through the illustrative lens of his hands.
And it defuses three of the most frustrating parts of covering candidates today:
1) Lack of basic interest in the candidate: You're not just writing the bio of a candidate. You're telling a story, and if the story's inherently interesting, the reader is more likely to swallow it.
2) Surfeit of coverage: If every paper's writing something about the candidate, this is a way for your paper to write something different.
3) Politicians' manipulation of the media: When you're probing the story of a specific detail, you sneak past politicians' talking points.
In the comments, I'll post some of the participants' questions for Von Drehle, and how he answered them. Next up, Poynter ethicist Bob Steele, talking about ethical potholes in political coverage.
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