one want to feel
joy and pain from the standpoint of others. Naturally that sort of news
is always read; naturally the paper that devotes itself to such news is
always read and is always successful as far as circulation and profits
go. The papers that have that ideal of news behind them and forsake
every other ideal for it are called sensational papers. Whether they are
good or not is another question.

With this idea of what news values means and the idea that news is worth
while only when it interests the largest number of people of all
classes, we may try to look for the things that make news interesting to
the greatest number of people of all classes. The reporter must know not
only what news is, but what makes it news. He must be able to see the
things in a story that will interest the greatest number of people of
all classes. These are many and intricate.

=2. Timeliness.=--In the first place, news must be new. A story must
have timeliness. Our readers want to know what happened to-day, for
yesterday and last week are past and gone. They want to be up to the
minute in their information on current events. Therefore a story that is
worth printing to-day will not be worth printing to-morrow or, at most,
on the day after to-morrow. Events must be chronicled just as soon as
they happen. Furthermore, the story itself must show that it is new. It
must tell the reader at once that the event which it is chronicling
happened to-day or last night--at least since the last edition of the
paper. That is why the reporter must never fail to put the time in the
introduction of his story. Editors grow gray-headed trying to keep up
with the swift passing of events, and they are always very careful to
tell their readers that the events which they are chronicling are the
latest events. That is the reason why every editor hates the word
"yesterday" and tries to get "to-day" or "this morning" into the lead of
every story. Hence, to the newspaper, everything that happened since
midnight last night is labeled "this morning," and everything that
happened since six o'clock yesterday afternoon is labeled "last night."
Anything before that hour must be labeled "yesterday," but it goes in as
"late yesterday afternoon," if it possibly can. Hence the first
principle of news values is timeliness--news is news only because it
just happened and can be spoken of as one of the events of "to-day" or
of "late yesterday."

=3. Distance.=--Distan