XV
HUMAN INTEREST STORIES
In our study of newspaper writing up to this point we have been entirely concerned with forms, rules, and formulas; every kind of story which we have studied has had a definite form which we have been charged to follow. We have been commanded always to put the gist of the story in the first sentence and to answer the reader's customary questions in the same breath. Now we have come to a class of newspaper stories in which we are given absolute freedom from conventional formulas. In fact, the human interest story is different from other newspaper stories largely because of its lack of forms and rules. It does not begin with the gist of its news—perhaps because it rarely has any real news—and it answers no customary questions in the first paragraph; its method is the natural order of narrative. The human interest story stands alone as the only literary attempt in the entire newspaper and, as such, a discussion of it can hardly tell more than what it is, without any great attempt to tell how to write it. For our purposes, the distinguishing marks of the human interest story are its lack of real news value and of conventional form, and its appeal to human emotions.
The human interest story has grown out of a number of causes. Up to a very recent time newspapers have been content with printing news in its barest possible form—facts and nothing but facts. Their appeal has been only to the brain. But gradually editors have come to realize that, if many monthly magazines can exist on a diet of fiction that appeals only to the emotions, a newspaper may well make use of some of the material for true stories of emotion that comes to its office. They have realized that newsiness is not the only essential, that a story does not always have to possess true news value to be worth printing—it may be interesting because it appeals to the reader's sympathy or simply because it entertains him. Hence they began to print stories that had little value as news but, however trivial their subject, were so well written that they presented the humor and pathos of everyday life in a very entertaining way. The sensational newspapers took advantage of the opportunity but they shocked their readers in that they tried to appeal to the emotions through the kind of facts that they printed, rather than through the presentation of the facts. They did not see that the effectiveness of the emotional appeal depends upon the way in which a human interest story is written, rather than upon the story itself. Therefore they shocked their readers with extremely pathetic facts presented in the usual newspaper way, while the journals which stood for high literary excellence were able to handle trivial human interest material very effectively. Now all the newspapers of the land have learned the form and are printing effective human interest stories every day.
Another reason behind the growth of the human interest story is the curse of cynicism which newspaper work imprints upon so many of its followers. Every editor knows that no ordinary reporter can work a police court or hospital run day after day for any length of time without losing his sensibilities and becoming hardened to the sterner facts in human life. Misfortune and bitterness become so common to him that he no longer looks upon them as misfortune and misery, but just as news. Gradually his stories lose all sympathy and kindliness and he writes of suffering men as of so many wooden ten-pins. When he has reached this attitude of cynicism, his usefulness to his paper is almost gone, for a reporter must always see and write the news from the reader's sympathetic point of view. To keep their reporters' sensibilities awake editors have tried various expedients which have been more or less successful. One of these is the "up-lift run" for cub reporters—a round of philanthropic news sources to teach them the business of reporting before they become cynical. Another is the human interest story. If a reporter knows that his paper is always ready and glad to print human interest stories full of kindliness and human sympathy, he is ever on the watch for human interest subjects and consequently forces himself to see things in a sympathetic way. Thus he unconsciously wards off cynicism. The search for human interest material is a modification of the "sob squad" work of the sensational papers, on more delicate lines.
A human interest story is primarily an attempt to portray human feeling—to talk about men as men and not as names or things. It is an attempt to look upon life with sympathetic human eyes and to put living people into the reports of the day's news. If a man falls and breaks his neck, a bald recital of the facts deals with him only as an animal or an inanimate name. The fact is interesting as one item in the list of human misfortunes, but no more. And yet there are many people to whom this man's accident is more than an interesting incident—it is a very serious matter, perhaps a calamity. To his family he was everything in the world; more than a mere means of support, he was a living human being whom they loved. The bald report of his death does not consider them; it does not consider the man's own previous existence. But if we could get into the hearts of his wife and his mother and his children, we could feel something of the real significance of the accident. This is what the human interest story tries to do. It does not necessarily strive for any effect, pathetic or otherwise, but tries simply to treat the victim of the misfortune as a human being. The reporter endeavors to see what in the story made people cry and then tries to reproduce it. In the same way in another minor occurrence, he attempts to reproduce the side of an incident that made people laugh. Either incident may or may not have had news value in its baldest aspect, but the sympathetic treatment makes the resulting human interest story worth printing.
There are various kinds of human interest stories. The common ground in them all is usually their lack of any intrinsic news value. Many a successful human interest story has been printed although it contained no one of the elements of news values that were outlined earlier in this book. In fact, one of the uses of the human interest story is to utilize newspaper by-products that have no news value in themselves. Hence the human interest story has no news feature to be played up and, since it does not contain any real news, it does not have to answer any customary questions. In form it is much like a short story of fiction, since it depends on style and the ordinary rules of narration. The absence of a lead, more than any other characteristic, distinguishes the human interest story from the news story, in form. We have worked hard to learn to play up the gist of the news in our news stories; now we come to a story which makes no attempt to play up its news—in fact, it may leave its most interesting content until the end and spring it as a surprise in the last line. To be sure, most human interest stories have and indicate a timeliness. The story may have no news value but it is always concerned with a recent event and usually tells at the outset when the event occurred. Almost without exception, the examples quoted in this chapter show their timeliness by telling in the first sentence when the event occurred. So much for the outward form of the human interest story.
1. Pathetic Story.—One of the many kinds of human interest stories is the pathetic story. Although it does not openly strive for pathos, it is pathetic in that it tells the story of a human misfortune, simply and clearly, with all the details that made the incident sad. It is the story that attempts to put the reader into the very reality of the pain and sorrow of every human life. Sometimes it makes him cry, sometimes it makes him shudder, and sometimes it disgusts him, but it always shows him misfortune as it really is. It looks down behind the outward actions and words into the hearts of its actors and shows us motives and feelings rather than facts. But just as soon as any attempt at pathos becomes evident, the story loses its effectiveness. Its only means are clear perception and absolute truthfulness. Here is an example of a pathetic human interest story taken from a daily paper:
Rissa Sachs' child mind yesterday evolved a tragic answer to the question, "What shall be done with the children of divorced parents?"