The Value of the Small Item
By Walter May, Assistant City Editor, The Oregonian
After all, the big stories are the easiest to get and the little short, intimate items of persons and things in the daily newspaper’s field are the ones which put local editors into “tempers;” make the newspaper work thoroughly discouraging to beginners and show up the weaknesses of veteran, so-called star reporters. Top heads are essential and long stories have their place, but the small item is the backbone of the newspaper structure and the reporter who discounts the value of the short, personal story as he grows mature in the business of finding and selling news, discounts his own value just that much.
Big stories will write themselves, if they are in the hands of a reporter of comprehensive vision and reasonable experience. They are the delight of the make-up editor and the inspiration of the local editor. All honor to them and the men and women who are able to find them and write the facts into English. But every editor, charged with the all-round production of a saleable newsy daily, knows that the cares from the big stories are the smaller part of the day’s or night’s tribulations. The big task is to find the interesting short item; to get it written and get it correct. Here is where the average veteran reporter fails the editor.
Because Oregon Exchanges is meant for newspaper men I point out this fact—this weakness in a great many of the veteran reporters of every city. It is not peculiar to Portland, although it is a disease epidemic among our star men. Any editor or sub-editor who has wrestled with a lively grist of big stuff and suffered from a scarcity of small, crisp, intimate news must realize this.
The trouble is that too often the “cub” is relied on to develop this class of news. We let him do the drudgery of item-collecting so much that the veterans soon begin to shirk it; begin to forget to write it after they get it and soon for get to sense it when it is near. This last is almost fatal and from the viewpoint of the local editor or his assistant, it soon becomes the most apparent weakness of any reporter.
The importance of the big story and the thoughtful, careful handling of major events in the day’s developments need not be minimized in considering the short item, but it is the brief mention of the person or the brisk style of a 10-line article that the vast army of readers remember first in the day’s news. “Gossipy” news attracts the woman reader and a mere mention of a minor event causes the club man to slap his club friend on the shoulder and say “I see by the paper (and often he names the paper) that so and so has been promoted; has a baby boy or fell and broke an ankle."
There is also a mechanical advantage in the small item. It may relieve a heavy story on this page and dress up a long, solid story on the next. The small item advertises the paper, because it is invariably the small item that is clipped out and handed to a friend or sent to a distant relative.
The small items—when there are enough of them—interest just that many more people. One column of ten-line items will be personal with many more people than a column story of an impersonal event in the day’s calendar.
Experienced reporters can best handle short items. Their wide acquaintance gives them a knowledge of personal peculiarities which can be injected into the short item in a way that makes it valuable and interesting.
