The body of a watchman was found this afternoon in the ruins of the H. P. Jones Produce elevator, which burned to the ground this morning with a loss of $150,000.
The new story, while retelling the principal facts in the previous account, would give prominence to the latest news, the discovery of the body. As an example from a newspaper, let us take the follow-up of a murder mystery. The first stories on this murder simply said that a grocer had been found dead in the cellar of his store and murder had been suggested. The follow-up on the next day (printed here) deals with a new development—has a new feature—and carries the story one step further in the attempt to unravel the mystery:
Developments yesterday in the story of the killing of James White, the Park street grocer, tended to support the contention of Coroner Donalds and the police that White was not murdered, but died by his own hand.
3. Analysis.—So far we have treated the rewrite story and the follow-up story separately, but for the purposes of analysis and study they may be treated together, because the same fundamental idea governs both. Dissection of the follow-up story will also show us what the rewrite story is made of.
From the above clippings it will be seen that the lead of the follow-up story is very much like that of any news story. The lead has its feature in the first line and answers the reader's questions concerning that feature. It is simply a new story written on an old subject which has been given a new feature to make it appear new. Furthermore, it will be noticed that the lead of the follow-up story is complete in itself, without the original story that preceded it. Although the whole idea of the follow story is based on the supposition that all readers have read every edition of the paper and are therefore acquainted with the original story, yet for the benefit of those readers who have not read the previous story, the follow-up must be complete and clear in itself. New facts are introduced into the follow story, but its lead tells the main facts of the original story so that no reader will be at loss to understand what it is all about—in other words, it gives a synopsis of previous chapters. In many follow-up stories the new developments are supplemented by an entire retelling of the original story. This is especially true when one paper is rewriting a story which broke too late for its preceding edition and was covered by a rival paper. At any rate, every follow-up story, like every other news story, must be so constructed as to stand by itself without previous explanation.
Of the 142 bodies of victims of the Triangle Waist Company's fire on Saturday, that had been taken to the morgue up to noon yesterday when it was decided that all the dead had been recovered, all but 45 had been identified today.
This is a follow-up of a story two days before. Every reader of the paper probably knew everything that had been printed previously about the fire, and yet this lead very carefully recalls the fire to the reader's mind. Later in the story the principal facts of the original story are retold as if they were new and unknown.
It is interesting to see what in any given newspaper story can be followed up for a later story. The would-be reporter may get good practice in writing follow-up stories from the mere attempt to study out the next step in any given new story. With this next step as his feature he may try to write a follow-up story without additional information, and then compare it with other follow-up stories. For every news story contains within it clues to what may be expected to follow.
When any serious fire occurs certain additional facts may always be expected to follow. The finding of more dead, the unravelling of a mysterious origin, the re-statement of the loss, and the present condition of the injured are some of the possibilities that a rewrite man considers when he tries to prepare a follow-up story on a fire. The Washington Place fire in New York on March 25, 1911, furnished admirable material for the study of the rewriting of fire stories. The fire occurred on Saturday afternoon too late for anything but the Sunday editions. The original story as it appeared in the Sunday papers and the Monday issues, of papers which had no Sunday editions, began like this:
One hundred and forty-one persons are dead as a result of a fire which on Saturday afternoon swept the three upper floors of the factory loft building at the northwest corner of Washington place and Greene street. More than three-quarters of this number are women and girls, who were employed in the Triangle Shirt Waist factory, where the fire originated.—Boston Transcript, Monday.