How to write about people – updated

When I was a teenager, my parents were friends with Malcolm Hobbs, publisher of what was then a weekly newspaper in Orleans, Massachusetts. The Cape Codder was a respectable example of what might be called the golden age of community weeklies. From time to time, it ran detailed articles — "profiles" — of local worthies, a habit that one day generated a warning letter from a lawyer for The New Yorker magazine. The term, "Profile," he asserted, was a trademark of the great journal, who legendary founding editor, Harold Ross, first applied it to detailed articles about individuals sometime in the...