es in each group have some
one thing in common that may aid us in learning how to write them. At
most, the list is only a very incomplete summary of the more important
kinds of news stories and is intended to be merely a suggestive way of
supplying the student with necessary practice.

=1. Accidents.=--Accident stories may be anything from a sprained ankle
to a disastrous railroad wreck, but they all depend upon one element for
their interest. They are all printed because people in general are
interested in the injuries and deaths of other people--physical calamity
is the common ground in all these stories.

The number of possible accidents is infinite, but there are some common
types that recur most often. Among these are: railroad, trolley,
railroad crossing accidents; runaways; electrocutions; explosions;
collapse of buildings; marine disasters; cave-in accidents; elevator,
automobile, aviation accidents.

The feature of any accident story is always, of course, the thing that
made the story worth printing, and that is usually the human life
element. The feature of an accident story is almost always the number of
dead and injured. Most reports of railroad wrecks begin with "Ten
persons were killed and seventeen were injured in a wreck, etc." The
same is true of any accident story; if more than one person is killed it
is usually safe to begin with the number of fatalities. In this
connection it may be noted that the death of railroad employees seldom
makes a story worth printing; they may be included in the total number,
but if no passengers are killed, fatalities among trainmen seldom give a
story any news value.

Accident stories of course have many other possible features; newspapers
report many accidents in which no one is killed. In that case some other
element gives the story news value and that element must be played up as
the feature. Perhaps it is the manner in which the accident happened or
the manner in which a person was killed or injured, as in an automobile
accident. The cause of the accident may be the most interesting part of
the story: train-wreckers or a broken rail in a railroad wreck, or the
cause of an explosion. Very often an accident is reported simply because
some well-known person was connected with it in some way; the name then
becomes the feature and comes into the first line. A story may be worth
printing simply because of the unusual manner of rescue; such a feature
is often played up