“To be explicit, easy, free, and very plain,” was the ideal set down
for himself by Daniel Defoe in his news-writing more than two hundred
years ago. And despite its age the advice could hardly be bettered for
a newspaper man of today. For after all, what a modern reader of the
news-column wants is a detailed account of some happening, written in
such a style that it can be easily and rapidly read without thought to
its grammar or construction, and can be easily understood throughout.
That Defoe was master of such a style in his own writing will be
granted by anyone who has read his “Robinson Crusoe”--and who has
not!--a style which can be understood by a child of seven or eight and
yet which gives delight to grown-ups. No wonder he was one of the most
popular journalists of his own time.
When a man buys a newspaper on a street corner, what he wants is
manifestly a paper that will give him the news in an easily read
account. “News,” for him, may be something far different from what you
or I would call by that name, and perhaps he picks out a paper which
would furnish me with very little news indeed, very little, that is,
of the world’s current happenings which would interest me. He may be
devotedly concerned with the latest prices of dress-goods and men’s
clothing, or the most recent gossip from the ring-side, whereas it
may be that for me neither of these subjects contains the slightest
interest. Perhaps when you approach a news-stand, what your eye
naturally goes looking for is a sheet that gives much space to stock
quotations or political news or notes on recent books. What Mrs. Brown
always wants is a certain newspaper that devotes columns to the naming
of prominent people who have dined or danced, and to the detailed
description of the clothes they wore. Miss Black buys a certain evening
paper because the back page always has a lot of interesting little
stories drawn from daily life in the streets about her, little things
that do not amount to much in themselves but are written up in an
interesting way. And the fact that thousands and even millions of other
Americans are interested in the same things as the individuals I have
mentioned, has made American newspapers what they are, for better or
worse. It has made them, that is, a sort of glorified crazy-quilt of
the varied interests of their readers, with the individual news-patches
all worked out in a style which is at once detailed, loose, free, and
very easily comprehended.
The central key, then, to the problem of why we have so many newspapers
in New York, for instance, and why tens of thousands buy this paper
and other tens of thousands buy that one, is, of course, simply one
of interest. One man buys the “Times” regularly because he knows that
in it he will find the particular type of news that he is interested
in, and that it will be treated in a manner which brings out most
forcefully that interest. Another man will want only the Brooklyn
“Eagle,” as it will do the same for him. Another will choose the
“American,” and so on.
And the central key to all news-writing, one might say, is simply this
same matter of interest. If news is something in timely happenings
which interests the people, then news-writing is perhaps best defined
as the method of presenting the facts of current happenings in an
interesting manner. News-writing is, or should be, one form of being
interesting.
When a man picks up his newspaper he wants, as we said before, the
news. For that reason we have, in American newspapers particularly,
developed the headline to a high efficiency in advertising the contents
of the paper. This side of the question does not concern us here,
however, as headlines are ordinarily not written by the reporter at
all, but by specially trained men on the copy-desk. We are interested
only in the technique of the news-story proper.
Now when we sit down with a novel or a short story, what many want is
suspense. We do not want to know what the end will be. We want that
to come to us as a perfect surprise, and the more perfect our wonder
at the end of the tale, the better we feel it is. We like to be kept
guessing about the outcome of the narrative. If we can predict it we
generally call the writer a failure.
The beginning of a news-story is diametrically opposed to this
procedure. What a man wants when he begins to read a news-story is
not suspense, but news. He is interested in the news, and he wants it
given to him as soon and as quickly as possible. He wants to be as
fully informed of the news in as short a time as possible, with all
the essential facts at the beginning. Then if he wants to go on with
the story he is at liberty to do so. If he is interested in the minor
details he can continue down the column. But what he wants at the very
beginning of his story is the main facts, and this is responsible for
what we call in America the “lead of the story.”