How to Write a Specialised Profile Feature on Influential Figures

A specialised profile feature is one of the most demanding – and rewarding – forms of journalistic writing. Unlike a general human-interest story, it focuses on a figure whose accomplishments, stature, or influence already commands public attention: a champion athlete, a pioneering scientist, a cultural trailblazer. The challenge isn’t simply writing about someone notable. It’s capturing the person behind the public image in a way that is accurate, layered, and genuinely worth the reader’s time. Three things determine whether you succeed: choosing the right subject, conducting the right interviews, and doing the right research before you ever ask a single question.

What makes a subject profile-worthy 🔗

Not every well-known person makes a compelling profile subject. For a specialised profile, the subject must bring more than name recognition to the table. As the MasterClass guide to profile writing puts it, the story is built on a combination of facts discovered through research and interviews – so the subject needs to have enough depth to sustain that level of inquiry.

The criteria are essentially threefold: impressive credentials, significant stature within a field, and a reputation that genuinely excites reader interest. These three things together create what journalists sometimes call the “so what” factor – the reason a reader should spend ten minutes of their day learning about this person’s life.

In a sports context, this means profiling someone who has won a major national or international championship, not simply a player with local fame. A regional footballer might be interesting to a local audience, but a specialised sports profile demands a subject whose achievements carry weight beyond their immediate circle. The trophy or medal is the starting point – the “what” of the story – but your job as a writer is to dig into the “why” and “how.” Why are they so driven? How did they develop their particular approach to their craft? What setbacks shaped them?

The same logic applies in other specialisations. A business profile requires a subject who has genuinely disrupted an industry, not simply built a profitable company. A science profile works best with a researcher whose work has real-world consequences. In each case, the subject’s stature comes not just from their title or trophy but from the layers of story beneath it.

Beyond credentials, a strong profile subject should have a story that hasn’t been told a hundred times. If a famous athlete has given the same interview about the same championship win for the past five years, there’s little new ground to cover unless you can find a fresh angle – a recent development, a surprising contradiction between their public persona and private reality, or an aspect of their career that has been systematically overlooked.

The interview: your most essential tool 🔗

A profile without a direct interview is, at best, a detailed biography – and at worst, it reads like an extended Wikipedia entry. The interview is where the raw material of the story lives: the direct quotes, the personal anecdotes, the unguarded moments, and the personality details that no press release will ever hand you.

Why face-to-face matters 🔗

In the digital era, it’s tempting to conduct an interview entirely over email or phone. Both have their place – email works well for confirming facts, and phone calls can supplement a longer conversation – but neither replaces a face-to-face meeting, especially for a specialised profile. Good profiles show, rather than tell, and so much of what makes a person vivid on the page comes from direct observation: how they carry themselves, whether they fidget when a difficult topic comes up, what their environment reveals about their priorities. These details simply don’t come through a phone line or an email thread.

Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Jodi Kantor of the New York Times has said that “to ask a really high-yielding question, you need to have done your homework.” That observation points to something important: the quality of the interview depends almost entirely on the quality of the preparation. A reporter who walks in unprepared tends to get surface-level answers, because they can’t ask the questions that push past the polished, rehearsed version of the subject’s story.

When possible, conduct the interview in the subject’s own environment – their training ground, their studio, their lab. Familiar surroundings tend to relax people, and they reveal character in ways that a neutral meeting room never will.

Active listening and the follow-up 🔗

During the interview itself, the most important skill isn’t asking the right questions – it’s listening to the answers with full attention. Journalists use active listening to pick up “crumbs” of information their subject drops in passing – an offhand remark, a brief hesitation, a phrase that suggests there’s more beneath the surface. These crumbs become the basis for the best follow-up questions, which often yield the most revealing material in the entire interview.

As the novelist Elmore Leonard once observed, “when people talk, readers listen.” The goal of the interview is to get the subject talking – genuinely, not in press release mode – and then to listen closely enough to know when to probe further and when to let the story unfold naturally.

It’s also worth recording the interview (with the subject’s consent) alongside taking notes. Relying entirely on written notes risks missing voice tones and inferences when you’re too busy writing to actually listen. A recording lets you stay present in the conversation and return to the precise wording later.

Interviewing the subject’s associates 🔗

A specialised profile is not a one-source story. Good profiles contain quotes from people who know the subject well – family, friends, colleagues, mentors, and sometimes rivals. These additional voices do something the subject themselves cannot always do: they provide an outside perspective, one that may be more candid, more critical, or simply more colourful than anything the subject would say about themselves.

A subject might be too modest – or too strategically self-aware – to describe their own impact in full. Their coach might tell you something that the athlete never would. A former rival might explain exactly what made the subject so difficult to compete against. A close friend might describe a moment of private doubt that contextualises the public triumph. Together, these voices help build what might be called a 360-degree portrait: rounded, textured, and believable.

This approach also offers a safeguard against a profile that becomes hagiography – uncritical admiration that reads more like a fan piece than a piece of journalism. When you gather multiple perspectives, including less flattering ones, the resulting portrait is far more trustworthy and ultimately more interesting to readers.

The non-negotiable foundation: pre-interview research 🔗

Among the most common and damaging mistakes a journalist can make in a profile interview is asking a question that reveals ignorance of publicly available information. If you ask a Nobel laureate to explain what they won the prize for, or ask a sports champion to remind you which tournament they won, you lose credibility instantly. The subject may still answer – but they’ll have already formed a view of you as someone who hasn’t done their homework, and that colours the rest of the conversation.

Preparing for an interview requires obtaining as much personal information on your subject in advance as possible – their résumé, published works, past interviews, and professional history. This research serves two purposes: it tells you what you already know, so you don’t waste interview time on it, and it tells you what you don’t know, which is where your best questions will come from.

What to research before you arrive 🔗

The scope of pre-interview research for a specialised profile is broad. Start with the subject’s own published material: their books, articles, speeches, or blog posts. If they’re an athlete, watch archived footage of their major performances. If they’re an entrepreneur, read their company’s founding story and any profiles that have already been published about them. Fred Zimmerman, a long-time reporter for The Wall Street Journal, advised journalists to research the interview topic and the person thoroughly – not only so you can ask the right questions and understand the answers, but also so you can demonstrate to the interviewee that you have taken the time to understand the subject, and cannot easily be misled.

Beyond the subject’s own material, scan past media coverage carefully. What angles have already been covered? What questions have already been asked and answered publicly? This tells you where the untold story might be hiding. If you’re writing about someone famous, they’ve most likely been interviewed before – so revealing new information, or a fresh angle on familiar ground, is what will make your profile stand out.

How research transforms the interview 🔗

When a subject sees that you have genuinely prepared, the dynamic of the interview shifts. They stop viewing you as just another journalist on a deadline. They recognise a professional peer, someone who has invested time and effort in understanding their world. That recognition builds trust, and trust is what unlocks the more personal, reflective, and vulnerable parts of a profile – the parts that readers remember long after they’ve forgotten the list of achievements.

Prepared reporters also handle unexpected moments better. If a subject mentions a technical term, references a past event, or alludes to a controversy, the prepared journalist can follow that thread in real time. The unprepared journalist either lets it slide or asks a clarifying question that signals they hadn’t heard of it before – both of which break the flow of the conversation.

Putting it all together: from research to story 🔗

Once the interviews are complete, the work shifts from reporting to writing. The profile should be structured like a story with a beginning, middle, and end – not like a résumé laid out in paragraphs. The classic structure for a strong profile opens with an anecdote that grabs the reader and immediately establishes something essential about the subject’s character. This is followed by the “nut graph” – a short passage that explains to the reader why this person matters and why the story is being told now. From there, the piece moves through themes drawn from the interview, weaves in background information, and typically ends with a forward-looking quote or reflection.

Throughout, the guiding principle is: show, don’t tell. Rather than writing that a subject is disciplined, show a scene from their training routine that makes the reader feel that discipline. Rather than telling readers the subject is warm, quote a moment from the interview where that warmth came through naturally. A profile should also express the essence of the personality of the subject, and it should end with a strong quote.

A specialised profile, done well, is more than journalism. It’s a sustained act of attention – a careful, respectful, and honest examination of a life that has something to teach readers about their own world. The subject matters. But so does the craft.

What do you think? When you read a profile of a public figure, what draws you in more – the story of how they achieved success, or the account of the setbacks they had to overcome? And do you think a journalist can write a truly fair and revealing profile without ever meeting their subject in person?

References

1. https://www.masterclass.com/articles/how-to-write-a-profile-article
2. http://journalism-education.cubreporters.org/2010/08/how-to-write-profile-story.html
3. https://raganconsulting.com/how-to-write-profiles-wall-street-journal-examples-profile-stories/
4. https://shorthand.com/the-craft/how-to-interview-like-a-journalist/index.html
5. https://www.columbia.edu/itc/journalism/isaacs/edit/MencherIntv1.html
6. https://www.liveabout.com/how-to-write-a-profile-or-interview-based-article-1360733
7. https://magazinetraining.com/wp-content/uploads/MTI-Fall-2016-Assignment-3-Writing-Profiles.pdf