batim
a large number of the interesting questions and answers. Or if he is
unable to be present he tries to get hold of the court stenographer's
record to copy out bits of testimony for his account. Beyond this
recording of testimony there is really little difficulty in court
reporting except the difficulty of separating the interesting from the
great mass of uninteresting matter.

As to the actual writing of the report of a legal trial, the one thing
that the reporter must remember is that a case is seldom reported for
the public's interest in the case itself. There is usually some other
reason why the editor wants a half a column of it. That reason is the
thing that the reporter must watch for and when he finds it he must make
it the feature of his report to be embodied in the first line of the
lead.

When we try to play up the most interesting feature of a court report we
find that we must fall back upon the same beginnings that we used in
reporting speeches and interviews. There are several possible ways of
beginning such a story, depending upon the phase of the case or its
testimony that is of greatest importance.

=1. Name Beginning.=--The proper name beginning is very common. It is
always used when any one of prominence is involved in the story or when
the name, although unknown, can be made interesting in itself--as in a
human interest story. The name is usually made the subject of the verb
testified, as in this lead:

| A. F. Law, secretary of the Temple Iron |
|Company, a subsidiary company of the |
|Reading Coal and Iron Company, called |
|before the government investigation of |
|the alleged combination of coal carrying |
|roads, testified today in the Federal |
|building that four roads had contributed |
|$488,000 to make up the deficit of the |
|Temple company during three years of coal |
|strikes.--_New York Sun._ |

The name of a well-known company often makes a good beginning:

| The Standard Oil Company sent a |
|sweeping broadside into the Government's |
|case yesterday at the hearing in the suit |
|seeking to dissolve the Standard Oil |
|Company of New Jersey under the Sherman |
|anti-trust law, when witnesses began to |