Profiles remain an ever present element of contemporary media – broadcast, print and online. They come in many shapes and forms – for instance, the feature-length piece devoted to an individual’s career, achievements or personal drama to the short and snappy Q and A of a person thrust into the news. Some profiles look at couples, parent-child relationships or even Father Christmas. They reflect the media’s ‘human interest’ bias: they are popular with journalists, readers and proprietors. Yet no text to date captures and synthesises the range of issues surrounding profiles: their histories, the ethical and theoretical dimensions – and the practical aspects. In our celebrity-focused age and as the space for reviews and analysis shrinks, the boundaries between public relations and critical comment have become increasingly blurred. As an essential aspect of literary journalism is its authenticity, journalists struggle to make profiles appear genuine in an atmosphere, especially with celebrity subjects, which is increasingly contrived. The text aims to be international in focus and innovative in its approach. New areas of research could examine the pleasures of reading profiles; or in the perils and pitfalls of writing them.

Sue Joseph, Julie Wheelwright and Richard Lance Keeble, the editors, are seeking contributions to this text: (of up to 300 pages) to be published in 2016. A major international publisher has agreed in principle to publish.

Section One: The Profile in History: Media and the Emergence of the Modern Sense of Self

Chapters here could focus on:

• Edward ‘Ned’ Woods Sketches of London Life in his London Spy, of 1698-1700
• Boswell and the making of Johnson
• The invention of fictional personalities in the journalism of Addison (Spectator) and Steele (Tatler)
• Stephen Crane’s portraits of New York City dwellers – compared to the portraits in George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London
• Dickens’ portraits of London life
• The moral/political urgency of Jack London in his profiling of the poor and unemployed in Children of the Abyss
• Melbourne Punch and the ‘character sketch’
• Robin Day and the invention of the ‘confrontational’ interview: Its impact on broadcast and print journalism
• Arundhati Roy’s portraits of Indian Maoists
• Social Media: Twitter/Facebook/blogging and the manufacture of modern identity

Section Two: The ethical/theoretical dimensions of profiling: Political economy, propaganda – and the performative

Chapters here might look at:

• The profiler as an improvisatory performer: the ethical implications
• Profiles and confessional/therapy journalism.
• Profiles and the propaganda model: the corporate context
• Profiles and the propaganda model: the political context
• Profiles and the use of subterfuge
• Immersion/literary journalism and the challenges of intimacy
• When a source becomes a friend…
• The boundaries between the profile as analysis and the profile as PR

Section Three: The practice of profiling

Chapters here might examine:

• Handling the range of genres: obituaries, vox pops, a day in the life, a life in the day, the Q and A format across the media
• The unspoken literary conventions of the ‘triumph over tragedy’ case study
• The techniques of interviewing: face- to-face, via email, via Twitter/Skype
• Michael Hastings and “The Runaway General” (Rolling Stone, June 22, 2010)
• Lynn Barber on profiling: A critique
• Journalism textbooks on profiling: A critique
• The inherent tensions within the celebrity interview
• The particularities of the sporting profiles and the secrets journalists guard
• The challenge of Leveson: How new privacy laws may affect profiling
• ‘The characters wrote themselves’ and other myths of author profiles

These subjects are neither prescriptive nor exhaustive. They merely indicate a possible range of topics that might appear in the text. There are clearly many other equally important routes to travel down.

Please send 200-word chapter abstracts to Sue Joseph at [log in to unmask] by May 30, 2014. Contributions will be confirmed by 1 July 2014. First copy will be due by 1 January 2015. The editors will return the copy with any suggested changes by 1 March – with the final copy deadline of 1 May 2015.

Sue Joseph has worked as an academic, teaching print journalism at the University of Technology, Sydney since 1997. She teaches journalism and creative writing, particularly creative long form non-fiction writing, in both undergraduate and postgraduate programs. She has written three books and is currently writing a fourth on Australian creative non-fiction writers. Her research interests are around sexuality, secrets and confession, framed by the media; ethics, trauma; reflective professional practice; and Australian creative non-fiction.

Julie Wheelwright is programme director of the MA creative writing non-fiction at City University London where she has worked as an academic and teacher since 2008. She is also the author of three books, most recently, Esther: The Remarkable True Story of Esther Wheelwright, (HarperCollins Canada: 2011) and has published widely on historical subjects as well as gender and sexuality. She was a profile writer for The Independent, New Books Magazines and for Scotland on Sunday for almost a decade and has written portraits of more than 200 contemporary writers of fiction and non-fiction. Her current research areas are: gender and sexuality, memoir writing, literary journalism, gender and historiography.

Richard Lance Keeble, Professor of Journalism at the University of Lincoln since 2003, has written and edited 28 books on a wide range of topics including journalism ethics, practical reporting skills, George Orwell, investigative journalism, peace journalism, literary journalism and the press coverage of US/UK militarism.