nced salary
over the ordinary reporter. Feature stories are coming more and more
into prominence on the large dailies because of their appeal to all
classes of society, and the beginner, as soon as he becomes acquainted
with his surroundings and gains dexterity in the handling of news, is
advised to try his hand at the human interest type. It will pay, and
success in this field will give a much desired prestige.

XX. CORRESPONDENCE STORIES

=285. Correspondence Work.=--In style and construction correspondence
stories are not different from the preceding types of news stories. They
are taken up for separate examination because their value as news is
reckoned differently, because the transmission of them by mail,
telegraph, and telephone is individual, and because so many reporters
have to know how to handle correspondence work. Statistics show that
20,000 of the 25,000 newspapers in the United States are country papers;
and it is from the reporters on these weeklies and small dailies that
the big journals obtain most of their state and sectional news. In
addition, every large daily has in the chief cities its representatives
who, while often engaged in regular reporting, nevertheless do work of a
correspondence nature. It is highly advisable, therefore, that every
newspaper man, because probably some day he may have to do
correspondence work, should know how to gather, write, and file such
stories.

=286. Estimating the Worth of News.=--A correspondent is both like and
unlike a regular reporter--like, in that in his district he is the
paper's representative and upon him depends the accurate or inaccurate
publication of news; unlike, in that he is comparatively free from
supervision and direction, and hence must be discriminating in judging
news. It is the correspondent especially who must have the proverbial
"nose for news," who must know the difference between information that
is nationally and merely locally interesting, who must be able to tell
when a column story in a local paper is not worth a stick in a journal a
hundred miles away. The best way to develop this discrimination in
appreciation of news is to put oneself in imagination in the place of a
resident of Boston or Atlanta or Chicago, where the paper is published,
and ask oneself if such-and-such an item of news would be interesting
were one reading the paper there. For example, one has just learned that
Andrew Jones, the local blacksmith, has had an exp