Union labor, horrified by the full realization that the waste of human life in the Triangle Waist factory fire might have been saved had existing laws been enforced, today arranged for a monster demonstration of protest, etc.—Tuesday afternoon.
And so the stories ran for many days until newspaper readers had lost all interest in the fire. Most of the stories were simply retellings of the original story with a new bit of information in the lead. People were ravenous for more details about the fire and the follow stories supplied them until they were satisfied. Rarely is a fire worth so many retellings.
A serious accident is often followed up in one or more editions. If many people are killed or injured, the revised list of dead or the present condition of the injured always furnishes material for a follow-up. Sometimes the fixing of the blame, as in a railroad accident, or other resulting features are used as the basis of the rewriting.
In the case of a robbery the commonest material for a follow-up story is the resulting pursuit or capture. Very often a final report of the loss, the present condition of a robbed bank or public institution, or perhaps the regaining of the booty, makes a feature for a new story. But usually the follow-up is concerned with the pursuit, capture, or trial. This is especially true if the original story has been told by an earlier paper and another later paper wishes to print a more up-to-date story on the robbery, such as:
MINOCQUA, Wis., Oct. 22.—It now begins to look as if the bandits who robbed the State Bank of Minocqua early Tuesday morning would make their escape with the booty. (This is followed by a re-telling of the entire story of the robbery and an account of the pursuit.)
The most usual follow-up of a murder story is interested in the pursuit, capture, or trial of the perpetrator of the deed. For example:
Following the discovery of the body of Pietro Barilla, an Italian, of Woodhaven, Long Island, who was stabbed to death by four men, presumably Black Hand members, in Lincoln Road, near Flatbush, early yesterday morning, the police arrested three men yesterday.
Very often the present condition of the victim of an attempted murder calls for a new story. The stories following the attempted murder of Mayor Gaynor of New York are good examples of the latter. If a mystery surrounds the crime a possible solution is grounds for a new story. The stories which might follow the unraveling of the mystery surrounding the fictitious death of the grocer, mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, would be second-day murder stories. The original story, let us say, was something like this:
James White, a groceryman, was found dying yesterday with a bullet wound in his abdomen, in the cellar of his grocery store at 1236 Park street.
The next story on the murder would be concerned with the unraveling of the mystery, thus: