The profile stories about the mayors of New York taught me a lot about these types of stories. The first thing I noticed was that each story starts with something that entices you to read on. I found the ones titled “Mayor of the Block” and “Mayor of the Children” the most interesting.
The Mayor — Gina Cecala, 82 years old and about five feet tall — got up from the folding lawn chair in front of her apartment building and walked into the French bakery next door. Without saying a word, she reached into the glass display case and pulled out a little ramekin of crème brûlée, turned around and walked out.
Eva Sanjurjo’s long defense of the Hunts Point neighborhood in the Bronx — against the trash dumpers and industrial polluters, the drug dealers and sex pimps, the slumlords, the speculators and the haters of all kinds — began with her decision in the mid-1970s to open a day care center in the basement of her parents’ home on Coster Street.
The articles focus more on the words then they do pictures. The small amount of pictures they do have are used to show the person in their natural element. The use of black and white photos also draws your attention to them. These profiles also dive into these people’s lives and pull out interesting facts about what they have done. In “Mayor of the Teenagers,” I found this to be quite interesting.
Friends admire Ms. Smith’s Afro (when she has one) and the colorful African dresses with head scarves she sometimes wears. In the hallways, even her ex-boyfriends stop to chat. It’s her impulse to make even strangers feel welcome, she said, because of the way she was accepted when she moved to the United States six years ago from St. Vincent and the Grenadines.
Overall, I learned that in profile stories you should have a few important things: background information, openings that draw the reader in, interesting/fun facts about the person and photos that capture them in their essence.
Ariel Melendez Journalism 