st stories. Most papers print them nowadays--they can easily
be distinguished by their lack of news value, and of a lead--and the
finest example is just as likely to crop out in a little weekly as in a
metropolitan daily.

=4. The Animal Story.=--The examples printed earlier in this chapter are
specimens of the truest type of human interest story because they deal
with human beings. They derive their joy or sorrow from things that
happen to men and women. But all the sketches that are classed as human
interest stories are not so carefully confined to the limits of the
title. From the original human interest story the type has grown until
it includes many other things--almost any piece of copy that has no
intrinsic news value. Every possible subject that may suit itself to a
pathetic or humorous treatment and thus be interesting, although it has
no news value, is roughly classed as a human interest story.

One of these outgrowths of the true human interest sketch is the animal
story. In the large cities, the "zoo" and the parks have become a
fruitful source of "news." Anything interesting that may happen to the
monkeys, or the elephant, the sparrows or the squirrels in the parks,
horses or dogs in the street, is used as the excuse for a human interest
story. Sometimes the purpose is pathos and sometimes it is humor, but,
whatever it may be, if it is clever and interesting it gets its place in
the paper, a place entirely out of proportion to its true news value.
The results sometimes verge very close upon nature faking, but after all
they are only the result of the "up-lift" idea of looking at all life in
a more sympathetic way. Several of the beginnings quoted earlier in this
chapter belong to animal stories and the following is a complete one:

| Smithy Kain was only a mongrel, |
|horsemen will say, but in his equine |
|heart there coursed the blood of |
|thoroughbreds. |
| |
| Smithy Kain was killed yesterday |
|afternoon, shot through the head, while |
|thousands of Wisconsin fair patrons looked |
|on in shuddering sympathy. |
| |
| It was a tragedy of the track. |
|