Newspaper Reporting and Correspondence / A Manual for Reporters, Correspondents, and Students of Newspaper Writing

by Grant Milnor Hyde

It is hardly necessary to repeat that one cannot write human interest stories in a cynical tone. They are a reaction against cynicism. They require one to feel keenly, as a human being, and to write sympathetically, as a human being. The reporter must see behind the facts and get the personal side of the matter—and feel it. Then he must tell the story just as he sees and feels it. Absolute truthfulness in the telling is as necessary as keen perception in the seeing. Humor must be sought through the simple, truthful presentation of an incongruous or humorous idea or situation; pathos must be sought by the truthful presentation of a pathetic picture. Just as soon as the reporter tries to be funny or to be pathetic he fails, for the reader is not looking to the reporter for fun or pathos—but to the story that the reporter is telling. That is, the story must be written objectively; the writer must forget himself in his attempt to impress the story upon his reader's mind. If the story itself is fundamentally humorous or sad and the story is clearly and truthfully told with all the details that make it humorous or sad, it cannot help being effective.

The best way to learn how to write human interest stories is to study human interest stories. Most papers print them nowadays—they can easily be distinguished by their lack of news value, and of a lead—and the finest example is just as likely to crop out in a little weekly as in a metropolitan daily.

4. The Animal Story.—The examples printed earlier in this chapter are specimens of the truest type of human interest story because they deal with human beings. They derive their joy or sorrow from things that happen to men and women. But all the sketches that are classed as human interest stories are not so carefully confined to the limits of the title. From the original human interest story the type has grown until it includes many other things—almost any piece of copy that has no intrinsic news value. Every possible subject that may suit itself to a pathetic or humorous treatment and thus be interesting, although it has no news value, is roughly classed as a human interest story.

One of these outgrowths of the true human interest sketch is the animal story. In the large cities, the "zoo" and the parks have become a fruitful source of "news." Anything interesting that may happen to the monkeys, or the elephant, the sparrows or the squirrels in the parks, horses or dogs in the street, is used as the excuse for a human interest story. Sometimes the purpose is pathos and sometimes it is humor, but, whatever it may be, if it is clever and interesting it gets its place in the paper, a place entirely out of proportion to its true news value. The results sometimes verge very close upon nature faking, but after all they are only the result of the "up-lift" idea of looking at all life in a more sympathetic way. Several of the beginnings quoted earlier in this chapter belong to animal stories and the following is a complete one:

Smithy Kain was only a mongrel, horsemen will say, but in his equine heart there coursed the blood of thoroughbreds.

Smithy Kain was killed yesterday afternoon, shot through the head, while thousands of Wisconsin fair patrons looked on in shuddering sympathy.

It was a tragedy of the track.

Owners, trainers and drivers always are quick to declare that no greater courage is known than that possessed and demonstrated by race horses in hard-fought battles on the turf, and the truth of this was never more strikingly brought home than in the death of Smithy Kain yesterday.

With a left hind foot snapped at the fetlock, Smithy Kain raced around the track, his valiant spirit and unfaltering gameness keeping him up until he had completed the course in unwavering pursuit of the flying horses in front. Every jump meant intense agony, but he would not quit. Not until near the finish did his strength give out, and not until then was the pitiable truth discovered. Men used to exhibitions of gameness in tests that try the soul looked on in mute admiration as Smithy Kain shivered and stumbled from the pain that rapidly sapped his life. Women cried openly.

Two shots from the pistol of a park policeman ended the life and sufferings of the horse that was only a mongrel, but who, in his equine way, was a thoroughbred of thoroughbreds.