ce is another factor in news values. In spite of
fast trains and electric telegraphs human beings are clannish and local
in their interests. They are interested mainly in things and persons
that they know, and news from outside their ken must be of unusual
significance to attract them. They like to read about things that they
have seen and persons that they know, because they are slow to exert
their imaginations enough to appreciate things that they do not know
personally. Hence every newspaper is primarily local, even though it is
a metropolitan daily, and news from a distance plays a very subordinate
part. It has been said that New York papers cannot see beyond the
Alleghanies; it is equally true that most papers cannot see more than a
hundred miles from the printing office, except in the case of national
news. Any newspaper's range of news sources goes out from the editorial
room in concentric circles. Purely personal news must come from within
the range of the paper's general circulation, because people do not care
to read purely personal news about persons whom they do not know. Other
news is limited ordinarily to the region with which the paper's readers
are personally acquainted--the state, perhaps--because subscribers
unconsciously wish to hear about places with which they are personally
acquainted. Any news that comes from outside this larger circle must be
nation-wide or very unusual in its interest. A story that may be worth a
column in El Paso, Texas, would not be worth printing in New York
because El Paso is hardly more than a name to most New York newspaper
readers. In the same way, the biggest stories in New York are not worth
anything in Texas, because Texas readers are not personally interested
in New York--they cannot say, "Yes, I know that building; I walked down
that street the other day; oh, you can't tell me anything about the
subway." News is primarily local, and the first thing a correspondent
must learn is how to distinguish the stories that are purely local in
their interest from those that would be worth printing a hundred miles
away in a paper read by people who do not know the places or persons
involved in the story. Colonel Smith may be a very big frog in the
little puddle of Smith's Corners, and his doings may be big news to the
weeklies all over his county, but he has to do something very unusual
before his name is worth a line in a paper two counties away. He is
nothing but a name to peopl