On Profiles

I never get a chance to check out the news in the papers until the afternoon, so when Dr. Harrison said that there was a pretty good profile on the front page of the today’s News Press in class earlier, I had to check it out.

The article is titled “His personal battle over, Kanzius’ cancer fight goes on” and seems to be sort of a profile. (The article is also available online. Here’s a link.)

The story is about the life and death of a Sanibel man who invented “what may be a groundbreaking treatment for cancer” and how his fight continues after his death. I must say that I really enjoyed reading this article and I think that the story is written pretty well with some interesting and engaging anecdotes.

However, there were a couple things that bothered me a little in this article. The article begins sounding almost like an obituary. In all honesty, I was not truly interested in the article until after the page break. I thought that the story was about another celebrated, heroic doctor who died recently, but when I read that Kanzius was a broadcaster, not a doctor, with zero medical experience, suddenly I was sucked into the story. However, this shocking tidbit is not revealed until after the page break. Kanzius’ invention has been previously covered in the News Press and perhaps this “grabber” is not necessary early in the article, but I still think that this sort of information should have been placed in the first few paragraphs and definitely before the page break. Once I read this detail about Kanzius, I was much more interested in the article and his life stories because I felt that I could relate a little more.

After reading this article, I also noticed something that we discussed in class today: the idea of making a profile subject look like the perfect, heroic humanitarian. I personally feel that the article made Kanzius look a little too perfect and heroic; I really didn’t see a human side of him. Perhaps the “human” side of him may be that he had no medical experience and still managed to create this impressive invention, but I think that would fall into the overdone “ordinary person overcomes all obstacles and rises to success” type of story.