This was more detailed, but not more calm than the opening of Edwin C. Hill’s story on the loss of the Titanic:
The greatest marine disaster in the history of ocean traffic occurred last Sunday night, when the Titanic of the White Star Line, the greatest steamship that ever sailed the sea, shattered herself against an iceberg and sank with, it is feared, fifteen hundred of her passengers and crew in less than four hours. The monstrous modern ships may defy wind and weather, but ice and fog remain unconquered.
Out of nearly twenty-four hundred people that the Titanic carried, only eight hundred and sixty-six are known to have been saved, and most of these were women and children.
Probably the most restrained lead on a Sun account of a great disaster was the introduction to the article on the Brooklyn Theatre fire of 1876:
The Brooklyn Theatre was built in September, 1871, opened for public entertainment October 2, 1871, and burned to the ground with the sacrifice of three hundred lives on the night of Tuesday, December 5, 1876.
Of a more literary character, yet void of excitement, was the way Julian Ralph began his narrative of the blizzard of March, 1888:
It was as if New York had been a burning candle upon which nature had clapped a snuffer, leaving nothing of the city’s activities but a struggling ember.
While on this subject, it is as well to say that the Sun, in ordinary stories, does without introductions. “Begin at the beginning” has been one of its unwritten rules; or, as a veteran copy-reader remarked to a new reporter who told it all in the first paragraph:
“For the love of Mike, can’t you leave something for the head-writer to say?”
Every young newspaper man hears a good deal about “human-interest stories.” Some of the professors of journalism tell their pupils what human-interest stories are; others advise the best way to know one, or to get one. It is not evident, however, that any one has devised an infallible formula for taking a trivial or commonplace event and, by reason of the humour, pathos, or liveliness thereof, lifting it to a higher plane.