Speaker 1: I have a fascination with profiles. How many of you are working journalists or have been? Okay. How many of you teach? Any teachers in here? Okay. This works if you are a reporter. This works if you're an editor. If you're not in those worlds but are just writing or wanting to know your family's history, this is an interesting approach to it. What I found over the years is that when we do profiles, people tend to be complex creatures whose lives play out in layers. And yet when we jump in and write about them, we tend to put them into more of a cardboard kind of narrow superficial box. And the box often looks like this. I'm going to use me for now as an example just because I know me. And the box often looks like a standard bio or resume. And it is based on those markers in our lives that we all agree as a society tend to be shared significant markers. Born, graduated high school, graduated college. First job, second job, third job. I move around a lot. Fourth job, fifth job. Oh, finalist for Pulitzer. I win a Pulitzer, start teaching, blah, blah, blah. If I were somebody else, you'd see when I got married. I skipped that one. You'd see my children. So you think of the things that you can tick off a list. And it's a very important list to know because it shows you the accurate trajectory of somebody's life. But it's only part of their life. I think of this as standard bio material. It's the stuff of resume. It's the stuff of, it's where you begin on Ancestry.com. It's the stuff that I knew about my parents because I knew when they were born and when they got married and when they had their kids and when they retired and when they got sick and when they died. It's the stuff that goes in obituaries. It is not the stuff of our lives. So what I've been doing lately, mostly as I work with students, and we talked this morning about the lack of context that is inherent in some of our journalism, is trying to create an approach or a method of interviewing and reporting, sometimes just thinking, sometimes actually interviewing people, that helps us see the fuller context of people's lives. So if this is my life played out in a standard bio, there's a parallel to that life that plays out in defining moments. So the things that actually shaped me, not because they were the things you ticked off on a list, but because they were moments in which I had to make a crucial choice, moments in which something happened to me that affected me deeply, influenced me, sent me on a certain path, maybe shaped my views and attitudes. So they're the things in my life that are around me that I then respond to and become the person I am. So graduating high school in 1970, fine, but actually a bigger significant moment for me would have been a year later, or a year sooner, I'm sorry, a year sooner, when I was sitting on the top of the water tower in my hometown, madly in love with a farm boy from up the road, and we were watching the airplanes take off and land in Green Bay Airport, about 20 miles from my home, and we were talking about what we wanted out of our lives, and he wanted to settle down and get married and make a lot of money and have kids, and I wanted to go everywhere in the world and see everything and know everybody. We looked at each other and said, we're not going to be together. That was a hugely defining moment in my life because I had a choice to make. I had a choice to make. Graduating from college, yeah, that was a big deal, but actually the bigger deal was the summer before, in 73, when I got, by serendipity, an internship at the Wall Street Journal because at the last minute some Ivy Leaguer had bailed out, and the bureau chief in Boston was a Marquette grad where I went to college, and he called and he said, send me whoever you've got who's going to be any good, and I headed off to Boston, and that summer at the Wall Street Journal shaped my journalism for all times. I could tell you that being a finalist for the Pulitzer and winning the Pulitzer was a big deal, but the defining moment in my life was in early 1985 when I was handed a choice in my newspaper. Go be the first woman to cover the state legislature or go to Africa and cover the famine, and you can't do both. So I made a choice, and it changed the trajectory of my career. You can go through my whole life like this or anybody's lives because these things that happen really are just those markers. It's the things that happen here that we have to make a decision about or that are foisted on us who make us who we are, and they're much more interesting. They tell us much more about character, about our value system, about how we're going to perform if we're hired as a CEO. Boy, if I were going to marry somebody, I'd want to know this stuff. This stuff, look it up. This is Google. I'd want to know this stuff. Then, if you really want to get interesting, there's a third timeline that you can put on an absolute parallel track which is about historical sociopolitical context. What's going on in the bigger world, the wallpaper, let's say, of somebody's existence, somebody's time on this earth that may influence them? Now, I see a few people in here who are my cohorts, thank God, because when I ask my students this, and I say, okay, let's go back to 1970 when I graduated from high school. What was happening in the 60s, I ask? They're like, um, um, um. I'm like, okay, okay, come on. Let's go forward to 74. What was happening? They still don't know how to answer the question. But it's really interesting because if I'm born in a small town, very, very traditional immigrant community, traditional values, Catholic, and all of a sudden in the 60s I run into civil rights, the hippie movement, women's rights. Maybe this has influenced how I made my decisions. Hey, I get out of high school in 1970. Guess what happens in 71 and 72? Roe v. Wade, the birth control pill. Title IX goes into place after I graduate from high school, which means I never got a scholarship, a sports scholarship to college. That shaped my life. I'm still pissed about it. 74, I graduate from college, but guess what else was going on in 74? When I get out of journalism school, what's going on? Watergate and Vietnam. Huge, huge, huge. Very different from Katie Bergen. Graduated from Missouri five years ago, four years ago. Different context to her life. So looking at this forces me as a journalist or a listener to think about what was going on in someone's life when they were living it that I might not know about. So how do you use this? I actually ask reporters to take a piece of paper, a notebook, draw it out, give it to the person, sit down next to them and say, let's look at your life along these three timelines. And it's really interesting because, especially if they're students, they're like, is anybody going to want to do this? People get so excited about this because they start seeing things that they had forgotten about. Because we get used to listing this off when all of a sudden when you start asking, but what were the moments that really shaped you? You start getting stories out of people. And stories make more of a difference. Very quick story. I have a student now who's working on a piece about a 72-year-old man who is running for mayor. He was elected mayor of a small town in Missouri 12 times. Then he stepped out and now he's running again. He's a very interesting character because this is a tiny, tiny, tiny town in very conservative Missouri. He was the first openly gay person in America elected to be a mayor of a town back in 1971. No, 1981. 1981. Very, very interesting. When you go through... So I have a young student working on this piece about this guy, but what I had him do was do this timeline. He's learning all kinds of things about this guy that have never been written before, like the defining moment that says, no, I was never bullied for being gay in high school, but what happened was when I was playing junior high football, my teeth were knocked out, and I didn't smile for another 20 years because I couldn't afford new teeth. That's how I was bullied. That affected me more than being gay. Very interesting. The moment he was being drafted, probably right about in here, a little older than me, and his mother came by and looked at the draft form and said, you know, there's a box you can check and then you won't have to go to Vietnam. That was the moment he realized his mother knew he was gay. That is an interesting moment in that man's life. So we've gone through his entire life, and I've told my student, you find out the history of the gay rights movement and the history that was going on in this guy's life, and then you find out what was going on here because, you know, when he was elected mayor and reelected, stipulate, go to Google. Thank you. Thank you.