find any of these people and must ask the
fire chief or some one else to give him what facts and estimates he can.
If the fire is at all serious he must find out who was killed or
injured and get their names and addresses and the nature of their injury
or the manner of their death. Perhaps he can talk to some of the people
who had narrow escapes, or interview the friends or relatives of the
dead. Everywhere he turns new clues open up, and he must follow each one
of them in turn until he is sure that he has all the facts.

=6. Point of View.=--The task would be easy if every one could tell the
reporter just the facts that his paper wants. But in the confusion every
one is excited and fairly bubbling over with rumors and guesses which
may later turn out to be false. Each person who is interested in the
incident sees and tells it only from his own point of view. Obviously
the reporter's paper does not want the facts from many different points
of view, nor even from the point of view of the fire department, of the
owner, or of the woman who was rescued from the third floor. The paper
wants the story from a single point of view--the point of view of an
uninterested spectator. Consequently the reporter must get the facts
through interviews with a dozen different people, discount possible
exaggeration and falsity due to excitement, make allowances for the
different points of view, harmonize conflicting statements, and sift
from the mass what seems to him to be the truth. Then he must write the
story from the uninterested point of view of the public, which wants to
hear the exact facts of the fire told in an unprejudiced way. Never does
the story mention any of the interviews behind it except when the
reporter is afraid of some statement and wants to put the responsibility
upon the person who gave it to him. And so the finished story that we
read in the next morning's paper is the composite story of the fire
chief, the owner, the tenant, the man who discovered the fire, the widow
who was driven from her little flat, the little girl who was carried
down a ladder through the smoke, the man who lost everything he had in
the world, and the cynic who watched the flames from behind the
fireline--all massed together and sifted and retold in an impersonal way
from the point of view of a by-stander who has been everywhere through
the flames and has kept his brain free from the terror and excitement of
it all.

The same is true of ev