. Umpire--Enslley, Purdue. |
|Referee--Holt, Lehigh. Field |
|judge--Hackensaa, Chicago. Head |
|linesman--Seymour, Delaware. Time of |
|periods--fifteen minutes. |

Dispatches and stories on baseball games and track meets are usually
accompanied by tables of results, similar to the above but arranged in a
slightly different way. The form may be learned from any reputable
sporting sheet.

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