There were tears in her eyes when she explained that she could no longer afford to keep up her own automobile. Etc., etc.—Milwaukee Free Press.
This sort of dialogue is dangerous and may easily be overworked, but it is very often extremely effective. One word like "sadly," above, may convey more meaning than many lines of explanation.
These quotations are usually interspersed with paragraphs which summarize the unimportant intervening testimony. The running story attempts to follow the progress of the hearing in greater or less detail, depending upon the space given to the story, just as a speech report attempts to follow a public discourse. Dry and unimportant facts are briefly summarized, interesting parts of the testimony are quoted in full. The running story is usually written while the hearing is in session or taken from a stenographic report of the hearing. After the running story has been completed, the reporter prepares a lead for the beginning to summarize the results or to play up the most significant part of the story. If the running story is short a lead of one paragraph is sufficient, but if it is long, the lead may be expanded into several paragraphs.
XIII
SOCIAL NEWS AND OBITUARIES
The study of newspaper treatment of social news is a broad one. Every newspaper has its own system of handling social news and the general tendencies that are to be noted deal rather with the facts that are printed than with the manner of treatment. Every newspaper gives practically the same facts about a wedding but each individual newspaper has a method of its own of writing up those facts. One thing that is always true of social news reporting is that the amount of space given to social items varies inversely with the importance of the newspaper and the size of the city in which it is printed. A little country weekly or semi-weekly in a small town does not hesitate to run two columns or more on Sadie Smith's wedding. The report runs into minute details and anecdotes that all of the "Weekly's" readers know before the paper arrives. But the editor prints everything he can find or invent simply because all of his readers are more or less personally connected with the affair and are anxious to see their names in print and to read about themselves. The liberty that such an editor gives himself is of course impossible in a larger paper.
On the other hand, a daily in a city of average size would reduce such a story to a stickful and a metropolitan daily would run only a one-line announcement in the "List of marriages," unless the story was especially interesting. The same thing applies to all social stories. Some metropolitan newspapers do not run social news at all.
All of this is true because social news is governed by the same principles that regulate all news values. Unless a society event has some feature that is interesting impersonally—that is, of interest to readers who do not know the principals of the event—it is of value only as a larger or smaller number of the paper's readers are personally connected with the event. Hence in a small town where every one knows every one else, society news is of great value. In a large city a very small proportion of the readers are connected with the social items that the paper has to print and are therefore not interested in them—accordingly the newspaper either cuts them down to a minimum of space or does not run them at all.