few
follow the physicians and scientists through the coming weeks and
months in their unflagging determination to learn the causes of the
disease, to effect cures, and to prevent a recurrence of it as an
epidemic. Yet such news is constructive and is of greater value probably
to the readers than the somewhat sensational figures of the plague. For
the scientists will conquer in the end, and all along the way their
improved methods of cure and prevention will be of educational value to
the public. So also with strikes, wrecks, fires, commercial panics,
graft and crime exposures, etc.; the reporter is advised to follow the
story through the weeks to come, not necessarily writing of it all the
while, but holding it in prospect for the constructive news that is sure
to follow.

=262. Following up a Story.=--The first story which the new reporter
will have to follow up he will some day find stuck behind the platen of
his typewriter. It will have been put there by one of the copy-readers
who has read the local papers of the preceding morning or afternoon and
has clipped this article as one promising further developments. The
first thing to do is to read the whole story carefully. (As a matter of
fact, the reporter really should have read and should be familiar with
the story already. Familiarity with all the news is expected of
newspaper men at all times.) Then he should look to see if the reporter
writing the story has played up the real features. In his haste to get
the news into print, the other reporter may have missed the main
feature. A delightful case in point is a "follow-up" of an indifferent
story appearing in a New York morning paper:

|Because they were penniless and hungry, Charles |
|Ewart, 31 years old, and his wife Emily, living at |
|646 St. Nicholas Avenue, were arrested yesterday in |
|the grocery store of Jacob Bosch, 336 St. Nicholas |
|Avenue, charged with shoplifting. When arrested by |
|Detective Taczhowski, who had trailed them all the |
|way from a downtown department store, seven eggs and|
|a box of figs were found in Mrs. Ewart's handsome |
|blue fox muff.... |

But the cause of the couple's pilfering was not poverty or hunger, as
was shown by a clever writer on the _New York World_ who covered the
story that afternoon. Here is his write-up, in which the reader should
note the entire change of tone and the happy hand