Articulo_9_EN_Doxa_31_Literary_resources

1. Introduction

“More than simply asking questions, one must use the art of observation in order to create a good profile. Our job as journalists is to review the legend that a person recounts about him or herself”, states Leila Guerriero in a workshop entitled Periodismo narrativo: reporteo, mirada y estilo, (Narrative Journalism: reportage, observation and style), which she conducted on 24 May 2017 at the Fundación Gabo (Gabo Foundation, 2017). This definition contains the basic features of the profile: it implies “the art of observing” the person being profiled, and consists of “examining the legend a person tells about him or herself”. In other words, a profile involves the journalistic investigation of a person, focusing on areas that no one has yet examined, with the intention of illuminating obscure aspects of the person.

The term profile has been widely recognized and used in Anglo-Saxon journalism. According to Johnson (1972), it had already been mentioned in 1925 in one of the great magazines of literary journalism, The New Yorker, and was included in classic manuals such as Brennecke and Clark’s Magazine article writing, 1942. Profiles published by The New Yorker magazine were instrumental in the development and consolidation of the genre (Friedlander and Lee, 1988: 203): “For magazines, profiles tend to have the characteristics granted by The New Yorker, which coined the term and established a high standard of quality by which profiles are still judged”. In the 1960s and 70s, the New Journalism of the USA made the profile article one of its star genres thanks to the proliferation of magazines with sufficient interest and space to commission long-form profiles from their contributors. Esquire, Rolling Stone, Harper’s Magazine and the New York Times Magazine, among others, published profile stories written by journalists who are now as widely known as Gay Talese and Norman Mailer.

Its introduction into Spanish-language journalism has been slower. Only in the last three decades has it been defined as such, with its own characteristics that differentiate it from other similar genres considered “biographical”, such as the profile or personal interview, although it does not appear in the style guides of El Mundo, ABC and Vocento. It is mentioned in the Libro de Redacción de La Vanguardia (the La Vanguardia Style Guide) (2004), but as part of the reporting genre and without a date or signature. In the 2002 edition of the El País Style Guide, the profile is regarded as a sub-genre of the interview format, and the 2014 edition of the same style guide adds that it “mixes elements of a news report and a statement interview” (2014: 51). Moreover, there is hardly any theoretical research, and only one rudimentary book dedicated exclusively to this genre: El perfil periodístico (The Journalistic Profile) (2010), by Belén de Rosendo.

However, in the last two decades, several authors have begun to classify the profile among journalistic genres. Vilamor (2000) distinguishes between informative genres – including the profile, biography, profile interview, and obituary– and genres that are opinion-related, infographic, and digital. As such, this author gives biographical formats their own entity (2000: 52). In their work entitled, Tipología de géneros periodísticos en España. Hacia un nuevo paradigma (Typology of Journalistic Genres in Spain. Toward a New Paradigm), López Pan and Sánchez (1998) used current criteria to classify the genres into the following: immediate reporting genres such as news and the chronicle, and broad current affairs such as reportage, interviews and profiles (1998: 15-35). In El estilo del periodista, (The Journalist’s Style) (2014), Alex Grijelmo differentiates between two genres similar to the profile: the interview-profile and the report-profile. He describes the