Variety, however, would be largely an absent quantity if all
news-stories started out with a bald setting down of all five of the
essentials “onetwothreefourfive, just like that,” as E. E. Cummings has
said. And variety there must be. The American newspaper is in a keen
competition against other newspapers and must attract its readers. It
must interest them, display its news in an attractive fashion, do it
better than the other fellow, display its wares in so interesting a
way that people will buy here rather than from the other fellow. This
is particularly applicable, of course, to cities and towns having two
or more newspapers, but it is also true of the little places that have
only one daily or perhaps only a weekly. In these cases, if the sheet
is written in an unattractive fashion, with the news badly presented,
there is great likelihood that large numbers of the people will feel
that “they can get along without the paper,” and away goes the list
of subscribers on the downward “path to the everlasting bonfire.” On
the other hand, if the news is brightly set down, with variety and
interest, there will be scores of people who will take the paper that
otherwise would not, and even if they move away from the locality they
will wish to continue receiving it.
What is it that must be added to the five essentials in order to liven
them and give them interest and variety for the readers? The answer
lies in a consideration of what it is that attracts the interest
of readers, what it is that readers are interested in. And here we
come back to the very first thing we talked about in considering the
news-writing of American newspapers--INTEREST.
People are interested in scores of things, as you will find out if you
scan the pages of a large metropolitan daily. You might almost say that
there is nothing in which they are not interested, if the matter is
presented to them properly. And the “properly” part of the preceding
sentence is what we must now consider.
In the first place, people are interested in anything which will make
a DIFFERENCE TO THEMSELVES. If I am a grown man and I see a train
approaching, I am not under ordinary circumstances vitally interested.
If I am on the track, however, I decidedly am interested, because
that train then may perhaps make a difference to me. Or if some of my
family are on that train, as I happen to know, and we have arranged
to wave at this point, then also I am interested, because, again the
thing makes a difference, however slight, to me. Or if I am interested
in mechanics and I suddenly notice that some improvement in machinery
has been built into this engine, I prick up my ears and am interested,
for here is something that matters to me. Or if there is a wreck or an
accident to that engine, and particularly if there are human beings
injured or killed, then again I am interested, because, after all, such
a thing might some day happen to me or mine, and I am thus touched in
my deepest interest--my interest in myself.
Thus, if any happening in the day’s news can be shown to be vitally
connected with the WELFARE of the readers, that happening will make
good news, and will stir the interest of the readers. It is undoubtedly
on this basis that we are all interested in political news, in
questions of taxes and tariffs, civic improvements, international
relations, wars, scientific discoveries, etc. We are interested in them
only to the extent, generally, that they are seen to touch our daily
lives, to the extent that they make a difference to us. If the Grand
Lama of Thibet makes a new law about transportation in his realm, I am
not interested, because it makes no difference to me, so far as I know.
But if I am told that as a result of this, my wife can have silk more
cheaply, or tea will be twenty-five cents dearer, I sit up and take
notice, and the thing has become news indeed. Before, the thing was
only a happening on the other side of the world, and touched me not.
But now it has been brought into my field of concern, by touching my
interests, and I am wide awake to the recent developments over there.
SPORTS are, of course, another field in which the American public shows
interest, and almost any information from its activities will be given
space on the sports page of the papers and be read with avidity. Even
quoits or horseshoes are sometimes featured on the sports page, and the
big games of baseball or football actually become sometimes the most
prominent story on the first page of the paper, driving international
and national news to subordinate positions and sometimes to inner pages.
HOBBIES offer another opportunity to catch the reader’s attention with
matters that interest him. Chess and bridge would come under this head,
I suppose. Radio and wireless, new wrinkles in diving and swimming,
recent developments in crochet stitches or the making of strawberry
preserves, etc., can properly be included here, perhaps, as news of
all these recent developments will make real news. In the spring when
tens of thousands of people will be interested in gardens, any and all
information about growing things will have interest for readers, and
hence will constitute, for them, news. Some papers can even, according
to the nature of their subscription-list, offer recent developments
of art, literature, music, architecture, etc., as news, and have it
welcomed. News about new plays and motion picture plays, if they are to
run for any length of time, is welcomed in the form of criticisms, pro
or con, of the first night’s performance.
All the interests thus far considered have been more or less, as I
said, based on our own welfare and the relation which we could see
between the new occurrence and its power to influence our daily lives.
Some of them have stepped over into the next division to be taken up.
When the great annual Harvard-Yale football game comes off, it is
looked upon as the classic game of the season. When the final series
of baseball games is played, it is for the championship of the world.
Even the most sluggish of imaginations will take some interest in these
events, however slight their ordinary interest in these sports may be.
This brings us to interest in the PROMINENT. There is something about
anybody or anything that has reached a supreme position in this world,
which makes us all stop and look in that direction with interest. If
the highest mountain in the world does something, we are interested.
If the greatest murderer in history has fried eggs this morning for
breakfast, we are interested. If the richest man in the world plays
golf, we want to see pictures of him in the act. If the manufacturer
of the greatest number of automobiles in the world gives a quarter to
a little girl, we stop and read all about it, or gaze with interest
on a photograph of the perfectly ordinary quarter lying in her quite
unusual hand. When a great tenor dies, we have stories about old ladies
who suddenly remember that he was their nephew. Just as a handkerchief
on which Napoleon once blew his august nose is still a center of
interest in the Invalides museum in Paris, so the tiniest fragment of
information about the greatest this or the greatest that interests us,
and thus becomes news. Big numbers impress us the same way. We seem to
be carried away by good round numbers. “Thirty thousand eggs” or “Four
hundred million toothpicks” seem to wield a hypnotic fascination on us
because of their resounding figures, and we are interested.
On the other hand, we are interested also in people and things known
only locally, or at any rate, interesting to us only because KNOWN
LOCALLY. If the carpenter next door dropped his hammer on his foot
and was laid up for two days, we might run a little paragraph on the
occurrence in the local paper. But if he lived ten miles away and was
not known locally we should hardly be interested in his accident, and
the story would never appear. If Amy White takes part in a college
play at the state university, we do not give a rap, unless she happens
to come from our home town, in which case we are interested and the
thing becomes news. If I live in St. Louis, I am interested in local
drawings, which will not appear at all in Chicago papers.
There is one field, however, in which we are all interested, no matter
where the thing happens. And that is the UNUSUAL. We are all wildly
romantic when it comes to this matter of the out-of-the-ordinary. So
much is this the case, that the life of a reporter becomes one long
quest for the most unusual feature in every story he is called upon
to write, as offering the best possible way of catching the interest
of his readers. He lives in one long flurry of the exceptional--which
perhaps is one of the causes of his astonishing grip on the secret of
youth, even into his last years.
This quest of the unusual takes all possible forms. If a thousand men
go up a flight of stairs successfully, they do not make news, but the
thousand and first man, who trips and breaks his leg while carrying
home a crutch for his wife who last week broke her leg on the very same
step, makes news. He has done something out of the ordinary run of
events. Ten thousand babies daily lead healthy lives in the country,
and they are therefore not news. But the baby who today swallows an
open safety pin and allows his mother successfully to remove it with a
button hook will very likely be heralded all over the lands as news.
Hosts of happenings are published daily in the papers of America which
in themselves are unimportant, trivial. But because they are out of
the ordinary, have the mark of the unusual on them, they are published
on the front pages of otherwise sedate news-sheets. The fact may be
telegraphed all over the country that such and such a farmer in some
little unknown place in Kentucky chopped off the end of his thumb
accidentally and a rooster ate it. Countless very high-priced linotype
operators will set it into type, and other highly paid workers will
put the fact on costly white paper, which will then be transported
in divers expensive manners to the readers--and all because of their
seemingly ineradicable interest in the new and the strange.
Still another unfailing interest is that in CHILDREN. A news-story
which otherwise would amount to very little will take on new value if
there is a child in it who can be written up, or “featured,” as the
newspaper reporter says. A fire which ordinarily could be adequately
covered in a hundred words, and which would only get a number four
headline will call for three or four hundred words and will get a
number two head if some man rushed back to save a child, or if a child
discovered the fire.
The same way with ANIMALS. The public is interested in any animal
story, wild or tame, and as in the previous story, if a cat or a canary
or a dog is rescued out of a fire or gives warning to the inhabitants,
the story immediately becomes for news purposes much more valuable, and
the animal interest is generally played up in writing such a story. So
much is this the case, that reporters in cities possessing a zoological
garden can well afford to make almost a daily visit to the place. The
fact that a lion cub needs a kitten for a playmate so that he won’t be
lonesome, or that the beavers are building a new nest seems to wield a
magic influence over readers.