Declan Schweitzer

Intro to Journalism

Heather Chaplin

10.22.10

Journal

In the past few weeks I have found that the medium in which a person or is profiled has a huge effect on what can be effectively portrayed about them. Depending what style or approach the profiler takes, the person in question can be a great way to make a larger issue accessible to those who aren’t necessarily ready to swallow a bunch of facts. It makes a story out of a movement or trend that need illumination but isn’t fun to read about. With a protagonist and their story however, readers are drawn in and can remain grounded by the character.

In a class I am taking on folk music, we watched a documentary on Bob Dylan entitled “Highway 61 Revisited” which was both a documentary about Dylan as well as a history of folk music. The film was able to use Dylan as a means of focusing itself but also incorporate many of the intricacies of the folk tradition. It went into a lot of detail about the highway and how music travelled and changed as it went from the southern tip of Louisiana to the northern end of Wisconsin near Duluth. Part of the documentary was the film of a road trip with acted as a great way to transition back and forth between Dylan’s history and character, to the folk tradition and the role of the highway as a transmitter of folk music. What was nice was that they would play music or have someone begin to speak while you watched the road from a car, and you really got a sense of what it was like to be one that highway even if it looked like every other highway in the country.

Another thing I liked about the documentary that I felt was unique to that medium was the fact that you could see the character in question, which was nice because you didn’t ever feel skeptical of the description of him. In some of the profiles I have read I have believed what the writers say about a person, but I sometimes feel like I still haven’t completely grasped the image of that person in my mind. This happens especially when I haven’t heard of the person.

I liked reading the profile of Louis Weisberg because it had a similar project. Malcolm Gladwell’s article on Weisberg used her as a way into the issue networking and interconnectivity. This time however, it was ever more important to have a protagonist to follow through the story because reading unlike watching a film is more of an extraction of information so it requires attention. The attention grabbing aspects of Gladwell’s article were achieved by depicting the way in which someone who is a “networker” works the system of interconnectivity. The story was riddled with complex (in the sense that he is talking about networks which can get confusing) but concise anecdotes, which were used to divide scientific information. Without doing that, it would have been difficult to keep the reader’s attention on the topic of interconnectivity unless he or she was specifically interested in that topic.