Voicing the (Extra)Ordinary: Persona and Collective Life Writing in Journalistic Profiling

Journalistic profiling is a delicate ethical balancing act: When profiling celebrities, journalists risk contributing to public myth-making that advances the interests of the powerful; when profiling ‘ordinary’ people, journalists risk contributing to stereotyping that causes social othering. This article explores how journalists can use multilayered persona performances to avoid these pitfalls through a close reading of the award-winning Danish podcast series The Captain of Our Dreams from 2018. In the podcast, journalist Susanna Sommer (1966–) portrays Troels Kløvedal (1943–2018), a famous Danish author and long-distance sailor. By crafting a persona that represents the growing Danish middle class in the 1970s and, thus, stands in stark contrast to Kløvedal’s well-known anti-authoritarian hippie persona, Sommer presents a double portrait that avoids mythologising her famous subject as well as stereotyping his opposite, the Danish everyman. Instead, by virtue of the multiple possible subject positions that the persona performance constitutes, the audience is offered several different ways of identifying with the portrait, turning the narrative into an inclusive form of collective life writing.