|
| 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 lib