ESOL 840 Nicol Fall 2004 Student Name: _Maria Cristina Mena-Murphy__

Magazine reports: personality profiles/biographical essays (Note: your job is to find a well-written profile. Sometimes a piece of writing may be advertised as a profile, but be just a chronological listing of events. A real profile is an essay with a hook, angle, and theme.)

Due dates (circle one): #1 Thurs 9/9 #2 Thurs 9/30 #3 Thurs 10/21 #4 Thurs 11/11. 

Author or editor: unknown.

Title of article (always use quotation marks " " for magazine article titles): “Ramos, Jorge”

Magazine title and/or reference source (always underline complete magazine/book name): Current Biography

Issue, date, and page numbers of magazine: March 2004, pages 69 to 74.

Full name of subject of profile (= person article is about): Jorge Ramos

Hook: Copy exactly the words the writer uses to catch your attention and show you that reading about this subject was worth your time. (A hook must be sentences in the text: never title or subtitle.)

According to Louis Aguilar in the Denver Post (November 11, 2002), the broadcast journalist Jorge Ramos is “the Spanish-language equivalent of Tom Brokaw, Oprah Winfrey and Horatio Alger wrapped in one.”

Angle: Copy exactly the one sentence (sometimes several) that fully identifies the topic and shows the main point the author most wants to stress. This is the message the author wants to make most clear. It shows us what the writer thinks about the person who is the subject of the profile.

Ramos has become both famous and influential among Latinos in the U.S. and has developed a reputation as one of the foremost journalists in Latin America.

Ricardo Brown, a radio personality and the news director of the national network Radio Unica, described Ramos’s appeal to Lydia Martin for the Hispanic Online Web site (January/February 2001): “People perceive him not only as a solid, honest, hardworking journalist, but as a warm, kind human being who identifies with the reality here. All the success he’s had is due to the same work ethic and desire to better your life that Hispanics here have. That’s his magic.”

Theme: In addition to the main angle, to make sense of a person, the writer often presents the subject in terms of a less stressed theme: repeating ideas that show up again and again in a life. Copy down any words, phrases, or sentences that show the author is weaving a theme. You know it is a theme because it repeats: beginning, middle, end. These are NOT the same ideas as in the angle. These ideas are different from those in the angle.

Indeed, the nightly ratings for Noticiero Univision, which Ramos has co-anchored, with Maria Elena Salinas, for 17 years, surpass those of ABC, CBS, and NBC in some major markets specifically, Houston, Los Angeles, and Miami and are competitive in many others; moreover, as Ramos explained to Eliot Tiegel for Television Week (June 23, 2003), “We’re seeing an incremental increase in our audience on a year-to-year basis, which is the opposite of what’s happening with the English-language networks, which see decreasing viewership.”

Consequently, he believes that he has a twofold responsibility to the public. The first is “to inform the community and the Hispanic community on what’s important for us and what’s going on on a daily basis,” as he said to Sandy Mazza for the Greensboro, North Carolina, News Records (October 24, 2003); the second is to convey “a very simple message: If I made it, you can make it.” In a conversation with Matthew Estevez for Latin Trade (January 2002), he said, “I believe the most important social responsibility for a journalist is to stop the abuse of power. If we don’t ask the questions, nobody will.”

Thus, in terms of viewers, Ramos is as successful as Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw, and Peter Jennings. Within the Hispanic community, according to a report by the research group Hispanic Trends, in 2000 Ramos ranked third on a list of the most admired Latinos in the United States, behind the actor Edward James Olmos and Henry Cisneros, a former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development.

The second was composed of Spanish-speaking Americans who watched his news program every night yet knew little about him; in the third were English-speaking Americans who needed to know “that immigrants are here to work and make this a better country and that we are not criminals and that we are not terrorists,” as he told Mc Daniel.

He also quipped, “I am very proud of my Spanish accent. Especially because I cannot get rid of it.”

Choose only one by circling the number. Fit your writing onto the front and back of this paper.

1. Write a letter to the editor of the magazine where you comment on the profile.

2. Tell what the subject of the interview or profile learned form his or her experiences. Tell how the subject grew or changed from his or her experiences.

3. Write a letter to the author.

4. Write a review about the profile or interview, a review that can be published in our ESL newspaper The Seal.

5. Write a letter to the subject of the profile or interview.

5. -

Dear Mr. Ramos

I am a Chilean woman who likes to watch the news on Univision. I have seen you on TV many times, but when I read this article I realized that you are the same person who covered the news that I like very much. Also, my father-in-law was interviewed at the San Francisco Airport last year, by Univision, because of the new security measures at all the Airports, and how this affected the passengers. I was supposed to have seen that story, and record it, but I didn’t. So, I ask you if it is possible for me to have a copy of it? My father-in-law always wanted to be an actor, and the first time that he was interviewed, we don’t have a copy. You know how important is for a man in his 80’s to have the memory of his only appearance on TV.

Maria Cristina Mena-Murphy