Basic Newswriting & Reporting

Journalism 30

Course Description | Grading | Reading | Course Requirements |
Do's & Don'ts | Weekly Assignments

The Profile Assignment

1. Select the individual

Find someone associated with CSUS that you think is interesting, prominent, unusual, portrays a specific population in our community (working student, single parent, returning student, staff worker, faculty member, administrator). Find someone interesting by stepping outside your own little world. Eavesdrop. Observe. Sit somewhere new. Talk to strangers. Go to a lecture. Remember a staff member who treated you unexpectedly well.

Caution: Beware of conflicts. You cannot be enrolled in a class, be related to, work for, date, be related to the person you are writing about. There is an obvious conflict of interest, and besides, it actually can make it a harder assignment.

2. Make sure the person is available.

Don't select someone scheduled for a two-week vacation or will be out of town on business.

3. Your mission: Get to know the person.

Your job is to let the reader know the whole person. If you only interview the person and quote him or her extensively, it will be a very thin, non-revealing piece. Remember, a profile is not simply an interview.

4. Ingredients

You may –– or may not –– use a lot of the information you find out about the person. But you must know a lot before you can write anything. So, information might use could include:

• The person's background (birth, upbringing, education, occupation.

• Anecdotes and incidents involving the person.

• Quotes by individuals relevant to the story. Explain why they are here (Why Sac State? Why not Harvard?). Motivations? Defining moments (when did they know what they wanted to do?). What is important to them? Favorite books, classes, music, people, season?

• Try to spend enough time with the person for them to get comfortable with you.

• Your observations as a reporter. Status details. Their office, clothing, their relationship with others, how they sound, mannerisms, car. Any surprises?

• Comments by those who know the individual. Friends, acquaintances, co-workers, family, and (yes!) even critics.

• Google them. Check to see if they have been written about, have won awards, been cited in any way on the Internet.

5. Writing the profile

Think about what is the most interesting, telling, fascinating, unique thing about this person. Start your story there. Use the incident, anecdote, description, observation that begins to accuraely reflect your perception of this person (based on your reporting).

• Use anecdotes, incidents throughout, when possible.

• Use contrast to show complexity.

• Use quotes to add the subject's voice.

• Consider ending the story where you start. Try to go full circle in your writing.

6. The final product

The story should be approximately 1200 words. It is due on April 26 at the beginning of class. No extension! It should be double spaced, with your name and word count on the top. Try to write an appropriate headline.

SAMPLE PROFILES

Living the California dream
Eric Guerra's journey from the home of migrant farm workers to the halls of power in California higher education.

By Sylvia S. Fox
(December 2003)

When 25-year-old Eric Guerra arrived for his first meeting as a student trustee of the California State University system, he was anxious. As he drove toward a vacant parking place, he spotted a uniformed security guard approaching a little faster than he expected.

Great, he thought, nervously riffling through his papers for his official parking access card, his trustee agenda and a handful of identification cards. They're going to tell me to park somewhere else or tell me I don't belong here. He braced for questions. Instead, the guard leaned over to his window with a big smile.

"Trustee Guerra, let me get you your parking spot," the guard said.

"It was the only time I was flustered," Guerra recalled.

Since September, when he was appointed by Governor Gray Davis to one of the two student positions on the CSU Board of Trustees, Guerra has been helping set policy for the largest university system in the world. For Guerra, it is a high achievement. And for California higher education, Guerra brings a unique experience to a board that is dominated by corporate CEOs, high-ranking state officers and major political contributors.

He is the son of migrant farm workers who twice was smuggled into the country illegally so his parents could find work in the fields near Sacramento. Just two years ago, while serving as a student vice president at California State University, Sacramento, Guerra became a U.S. citizen.

"It shows where determination and a lot of hard work can get you and that the American Dream is still alive," said Debra Farar, chairwoman of the CSU Board of Trustees.

Farar said she was unaware of Guerra's personal background when she visited him on the Sacramento campus during the board's review of trustee candidates.

"I deeply respect Eric," she said. "This just adds to my respect."

Guerra's father came to California as part of the Bracero Program in the late 1960s, when millions of Mexican farm workers were recruited to work as laborers and were granted U.S. work permits. He would leave his wife and two sons in Jeruhuaro in the Mexican state of Michoacan for six to seven months at a time while he earned money picking figs, peaches, oranges or tomatoes. The men returned to Mexico each fall at the end of the agricultural season. And the baby boom was nine months later.

"You had a lot of kids who were Gemini," Guerra said. He and his brother were born in late spring, almost exactly one year apart.

In 1982, when Guerra was 4 years old, his father decided to risk bringing his family across the border to join him in Esparto, a small farming town 44 miles west of Sacramento. Guerra was left one night in Tijuana with his 3-year-old brother and some other children in a run-down motel while his mother crossed the border with other undocumented adults. The children were brought across later that night, packed inside an old panel van.

"I remember my brother crying and a woman holding her hand over his mouth, hitting him to be quiet," Guerra says. "It's stayed with me."

After rejoining their parents in San Diego, the Guerra family arrived at a cold, wet downtown Sacramento bus station, dressed only in T-shirts and shorts - a shock after the temperate climate of Mexico. Two jackets bought at the old Woolworth's store downtown got Guerra and his brother their first warm clothes.

Guerra soon started school in Esparto, including summer school through the Migrant Education Program. But when he was in first grade, immigration officials warned the family they would be deported if they didn't return to Mexico. Forced to leave, Guerra's family packed into their red Ford Ranger pickup truck with an old white camper shell over the bed and returned to Mexico - after a quick side trip to Disneyland.

Several months later, the family would return to California, once again smuggling Eric Guerra and his brother back into the United States, along with younger sister Vanessa, who had been born in Esparto. Finally, in 1986, the family became documented workers under an amnesty program passed by Congress. Even with the offer of amnesty, however, Guerra says it was terrifying for most undocumented workers to approach U.S. immigration authorities to apply for the program.

"Here you are disclosing everything about yourself," Guerra says. "But you wonder: Why should you trust the same police who have beaten you in the fields and transported you out of the country?"

Guerra graduated from Esparto High School in a class of 45 students. He participated in Boy Scouts and theatrical productions, and served as president of the local chapter of Future Farmers of America.

But it was during his senior year that another life-changing event took place - a meeting with a recruiter from the College Assistance Migrants Program at California State University, Sacramento, a campus support program for migrant and seasonal workers and their children. Fifteen students attended the meeting, and three, including Guerra, applied to be students at the university.

By summer, Guerra found himself deep into college and enrolled in a bridge program to help minority students prepare for engineering studies. The program involved four weeks of math immersion by the same professor who would teach them for the next two years. Guerra says he went to sleep at night seeing numbers.

The professor, Scott Farrand, said he soon became aware of Guerra's ongoing commitment to community.

"He was not the best student. He was not the most intellectually curious. He was not the most studious. But he was sincerely dedicated to helping others, to making sure that no one was left out," Farrand said.

Soon, Guerra was immersed in campus politics through a friendship with Artemio Pimental, a former CSUS student politician, now a deputy administrator for Yolo County and a candidate for Woodland City Council in the upcoming March election.

While he was a student government representative, Pimental dropped in on the regular Tuesday afternoon discussion by the College Assistance Migrants Program (CAMP) to talk about the opportunities in student government and to encourage students to participate. CAMP Director Marcos Sanchez says Pimental, Guerra and others started brainstorming about campus issues, with sessions often ending at 3 or 4 in the morning.

They would also sign up students to participate in rallies, encourage them to attend board meetings of the Associated Students Inc. and talk to them about issues involving the university administration.

When Pimental was elected student president in 2001, Guerra won the post of vice president. When Guerra was elected president a year later, Pimental was elected director of California State Student Association, a statewide organization that lobbies Sacramento lawmakers for the CSU. The state student association also interviews the candidates for trustee positions on the CSU board and forwards an unranked list of recommendations to the governor.

Early one morning during Guerra's campaign for student president, he left his campus politicking to race downtown to the Crest Theater in Sacramento, where he was sworn in as a United States citizen.

"All I could think was, this is the last INS line I'll ever have to stand in," he said, referring to the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service.

With Pimental's and Guerra's recruiting and mentoring efforts, CAMP has become an incubator for campus politicians. This year, half of the student government at CSU, Sacramento, is from the CAMP program. CAMP has also placed 26 interns in government offices in Sacramento as well as with the United Farmworkers of America office and the Univision Spanish-language television studio.

Guerra will also work in the state Capitol building this year, serving as a Senate Fellow as part of the Center for California Studies program. In January, he will begin studying for a master's degree in public policy from CSU, Sacramento.

After that, he's considering a law degree. Guerra will also continue to mentor his sister and brother, who are both engineering majors at Cal State Sacramento, and his mother, who is preparing to enter UC Davis to study child psychology. His sister, Vanessa, is serving her first term as the engineering representative on the Sacramento university's student board.

Guerra is more prepared than most 25-year-olds to sit elbow to elbow with a 19-member board that includes a who's who of California. He has engineering experience through a two-year internship at California Department of Transportation. He also worked his way up from a night janitor to building supervisor at CSU, Sacramento's University Union.
And as the Sacramento university's student president, he managed an $8.2 million budget for a student population of 27,000.

But his supporters say Guerra's strengths are more than his job resume.

"He is always willing to listen to everybody's ideas," Pimental says. "He always puts his two cents into everything. He does his homework. He comes up with ideas and supporting ideas. He reads up and does his homework. You will never catch him unprepared."

After his first anxious day on the CSU board, Guerra is long past worrying about parking and ready to face the issues - and the potential disagreements - with his fellow trustees.

This past year, Guerra organized student rallies and demonstrations at the CSU chancellor's office in Long Beach to protest student fee increases that eventually tacked on a 40 percent hike for full-time students. He says the state is reneging on its responsibility to provide a public education and that any fee increase should be to increase educational quality, not backfill the state budget deficit
.
Although he was concerned that his vocal opposition would jeopardize his application for the student trustee position, Guerra questioned how effective he could be as a trustee if he couldn't represent the student perspective.

"If they don't want me to speak out, what good would I be?" he said. "I don't think the governor put me in there just to agree with everyone else."

Novelist Mackey writes of the land before war and resource exploitation

By Kathleen Les. (April 1996)

Imagine a world where men and women exist in equal partnerships, where the earth is worshipped as a living female being and where there is no war.

Novelist Mary Mackey not only imagined such a world but created it in her Earthsong Trilogy based on archeological findings that suggest such a world really existed nearly 6,000 years ago.

"I'm not suggesting that we return to that time exactly," said Mackey in her office at California State University Sacramento where she is a professor of English, "but I would like us to return to that feeling that the earth is alive and we can nurture or destroy it and not just use it as dirt, rock and real estate."

With loose, long, blond hair and spectacle glasses, Mackey at 51, somehow looks younger than everything else about her suggests. She speaks quickly and her mind moves fast.

A highly regarded novelist, poet, screen writer and professor, she has completed seven published novels and four books of poetry with a her youthful energy that appears to have served her well.

For 24 years she has been a professor at CSUS where she is widely recognized for her classes in creative writing and cinema. She is also active in poetry circles where many of the poets are her former students.

For half the work-week she flourishes in Sacramento as a highly regarded and well-liked professor. The other half of the week she lives in Berkeley where she is active in Bay Area literary circles and where she keeps busy as a film script writer and book reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle.

Mackey grew up in the Midwest and went on to receive her undergraduate education at Harvard and her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Michigan in 1970. Since then, she has made California her permanent home — at least when she's not relying on one of the five languages she speaks fluently to navigate in her travels around the world.

She uses summers to travel and collect ideas for settings and objects for use in her novels.

"Every object described in the Earthsong Trilogy, for instance, is factual and researched," says Mackey who traveled extensively through Romania and Bulgaria to examine the landscape and ruins that form the setting for her two novels so far completed in the trilogy.

Several years ago, while doing research on goddesses and matriarchal societies, Mackey came across the work of archeologist Marija Gimbutas whose work in Eastern Europe revealed that the peoples who lived prior to 4,300 BC along the Ukrainian Steppes lived in what she coined a "matristic" culture.

These cultures afforded men and women equal status in matters of religion, lifestyle and sex. The earth was worshipped as a living being who must be nurtured and kept in balance in order for the people to reap her gifts upon which their sustenance depended.

About 4,300 BC horses were re-introduced and tamed by a group of nomads along the Steppes who mounted the horses and rode into Europe and introduced genocidal warfare.

"This was a great turning point in Western European history and in human history," explained Mackey.

"Prior to this time, the people seemed to know something about living in peace and harmony," she said. "What intrigued me was the change that came about when horses were introduced. The earth was no longer seen as holy. It was now seen as real estate."

Before the taming of horses, Mackey said these early people had no weapons specifically designed for war. What were previously egalitarian societies, became cultures where women and children were seen as property and were used for human sacrifices.

Mackey's first novel in the trilogy, "The Year The Horses Came," describes in fictional form this transition in history. The second in the series, "The Horses At the Gate," tells the story of how a peaceful people must try and defend themselves without losing their peaceful qualities.

The third novel still in the making to be titled "Fires of Spring" will look at how the old and new cultures came together in Europe resulting in the strong separation of men and women that changed the course of history.

Mackey hopes that her central message in the Earthsong Trilogy will spark attention.

"I think we do need this knowledge right now, it's essential," she said.