n your query. Do not say, "Bachelor elopes with girl,
daughter of woman he knew a long time ago." In itself the story
which this query tells might be worth printing, but it would not
be half so good a story as the elopement of John Smith, 80,
bachelor, woman hater, with the daughter of his old sweetheart.

When a good story breaks close to edition time and the
circumstances justify it, use the long-distance telephone, but
first be reasonably certain _The Star_ will not get the story
from another source.

Write your stories briefly. _The Star_ desires to remunerate its
correspondents according to the worth of a story and not for so
many words. One good story of 200 words with the right "punch"
in the introduction is worth a dozen strung over as many dozen
pages of copy paper with the real story in the last paragraph of
each. Tell your story in simple, every-day conversational words:
quit when you have finished. Relegate the details. Unless it is
a case of identification in a murder mystery, or some similar
big story, no one cares about the color of the man's hair. Get
the principal facts in the first paragraph--stop soon after.

Send as much of your stuff as possible by mail, especially if
you have the story in the late afternoon and are near enough to
St. Louis to reach _The Star_ by 9 o'clock the next morning. If
necessary, send the letter special delivery.

Don't stop working on a good story when you have all the facts;
if there are photographs to be obtained, get the photographs,
especially if the principals in the story are persons of
standing, and more especially if they are women.

Correspondents will appreciably increase their worth to _The
Star_ and enhance their earning capacity by observing these
rules.

II

NEWS VALUES

Before any one can hope to write for a newspaper he must know something
about news values--something about the essence of interest that makes
one story worth a column and cuts down another, of equal importance from
other points of view, to a stickful. He must recognize the relative
value of facts so that he can distinguish the significant part of his
story and feature it accordingly. The question is a delicate one and yet
a very reasonable and logical one. The ideal of a newspaper, according
to present-day ethics, is to print news. The daily press is no longer a