Martin Baker
Martin Baker is an Oxford law graduate and former solicitor. He is one of the UK's leading business journalists. Currently he is senior business writer for The Sunday Telegraph, and is also a published author.
The Art of the Profile
Martin Baker
Profiles are almost invariably not art. Some of them are not even artful. And none, of course, is science.
But getting it right stretches the skills of the finest literary artisan. Essentially, you have to strike a balance between reporting and portraiture (with, as any accomplished fine artist will tell you, an inevitable element of distortion, be it flattery or contumely).
You choose a line, an intellectual or interpersonal pose, and try to make your subject come to life – physical looks, the setting, the passions, the drivers of success and the greed for excellence that have made them worthy of the profile-writer’s attention. All in a few hundred words. It's never enough.
Few who talk of people leaving things out and selective journalism understand that the latter phrase is in fact a redundancy. Selectivity is the essence of journalism – you select out the relevant and leave the irrelevant off the page (the French understand this: they refer to literary journalism as redaction).
Selectivity is the essence of journalism – you select out the relevant and leave the irrelevant off the page
Students of philosophy will recognise the concept of the mind as a filter underpinning all this. Indeed the role of the mind is directly relevant to the process of profile writing. A key tenet for some classical philosophers is that the unexamined life is not worth living.
The problem as a profile writer specialising in business and sporting subjects is when one is presented with a subject who is driven, two-dimensional and, in short, shallow. The life in question may not be so much unexamined as unlived. Then, as a writer, one is confronted with the question: is the unlived life worth examining?
It is in cases like this that the news side tends to dominate. The obsessive trainer will meet with approval from his fellow compulsive runners. The workaholic will find process-driven killers in the committee room nodding in appreciation.
The readers I cater for vary enormously. I write profiles for the magazine I edit, European Business (see John Brock), a weekly City Profile column for The Sunday Telegraph (see Liz Paul and Tony O’Reilly). And I produced the longest-ever sporting profile in the Observer Sports Monthly (see David Moyes 01, 02, 03 and 04), of the Everton football manager, David Moyes. This led to my current collaboration with him on his biography – that will be the longest profile of all.