elicate lines.

A human interest story is primarily an attempt to portray human
feeling--to talk about men as men and not as names or things. It is an
attempt to look upon life with sympathetic human eyes and to put living
people into the reports of the day's news. If a man falls and breaks his
neck, a bald recital of the facts deals with him only as an animal or an
inanimate name. The fact is interesting as one item in the list of human
misfortunes, but no more. And yet there are many people to whom this
man's accident is more than an interesting incident--it is a very
serious matter, perhaps a calamity. To his family he was everything in
the world; more than a mere means of support, he was a living human
being whom they loved. The bald report of his death does not consider
them; it does not consider the man's own previous existence. But if we
could get into the hearts of his wife and his mother and his children,
we could feel something of the real significance of the accident. This
is what the human interest story tries to do. It does not necessarily
strive for any effect, pathetic or otherwise, but tries simply to treat
the victim of the misfortune as a human being. The reporter endeavors to
see what in the story made people cry and then tries to reproduce it. In
the same way in another minor occurrence, he attempts to reproduce the
side of an incident that made people laugh. Either incident may or may
not have had news value in its baldest aspect, but the sympathetic
treatment makes the resulting human interest story worth printing.

There are various kinds of human interest stories. The common ground in
them all is usually their lack of any intrinsic news value. Many a
successful human interest story has been printed although it contained
no one of the elements of news values that were outlined earlier in this
book. In fact, one of the uses of the human interest story is to
utilize newspaper by-products that have no news value in themselves.
Hence the human interest story has no news feature to be played up and,
since it does not contain any real news, it does not have to answer any
customary questions. In form it is much like a short story of fiction,
since it depends on style and the ordinary rules of narration. The
absence of a lead, more than any other characteristic, distinguishes the
human interest story from the news story, in form. We have worked hard
to learn to play up the gist of the news in our news sto