THE EDITOR’S PROBLEM
The city editor is often called upon to determine whether a happening shall be treated only as news or shall be expanded into a feature, or human-interest, story. The story of an aged miser’s death, for example, may be worth only a paragraph if written for its immediate news value alone. But underlying the surface facts there may be a story of intense human interest—the man’s life story. The field of investigation that opens before the news gatherer is fraught with possibilities. It is for him to clothe the skeleton of the story with the flesh and blood of reality. What of the man’s early life? Why his passion for hoarding money? What deprivations did he undergo to gratify that passion? These and other questions come trooping to the mind of the reporter in his quest of the story. The mere fact of the miser’s death becomes incidental—it is the “peg,” as the city editor says, on which the story hangs. What the reporter finds becomes the basis of a human-interest story. A paragraph stating simply that an old man known to his neighbors as a miser had died would mean little to the vast majority of readers, but the story of the man’s life, properly told, has the perennial interest of human tragedy.
Willingness to dig for facts goes a long way toward success in reporting.