Abstract
Human interest might be considered the earliest of the news values, and in the past century, it has been the most flexible, allowing journalists to report and present compelling stories that lie outside more formal news definitions. In this historical and longitudinal analysis of 75 journalism textbooks from 1894 to 2016, I argue that human interest has also been a central enforcement tool for the dichotomy between emotional ‘feature’ stories and rational ‘news’ content – a dichotomy that developed in service of the modern journalistic tenet of objectivity. Whereas news and human interest were nearly synonymous in turn-of-the-20th-century textbooks, the two concepts were soon separated to facilitate the erasure of feeling and emotion from the most significant news events of the day. A key implication of this historical rupture is a century of public affairs news that holds citizens at arm’s length, contributing to widespread detachment from the workings of government and disengagement from civic affairs.
In the first chapter of his US reporting and writing textbook The Professional Journalist, John Hohenberg (1983: 11) introduces a young reporter assigned to compile a casualty list after a Kansas cruise boat capsized. Hohenberg’s primer on journalists at work highlights the experience of Anita Miller to demonstrate that ‘the almost daily presence of turmoil, hardship and death … causes [general assignment reporters] to build a shield of detachment, even indifference. It enables them to keep their emotions in check’. Hohenberg introduces this phenomenon not to critique or challenge it, but to suggest that such a posture comes naturally even to neophyte reporters: ‘Miller knew this instinctively … [W]hen she began assembling her casualty list, she adopted the detached attitude so common to journalists in the face of disaster’.
The reporter’s subsequent description of the story in her own words expresses more ambiguity than Hohenberg attributes to her. She notes that while interviewing one survivor, ‘I dropped that barrier reporters put up to keep a detached front. … I think we need to drop that barrier sometimes just to stay human’ (Hohenberg, 1983: 11–12). Following up, however, Hohenberg sticks to his principal lesson. Introducing an excerpt of Miller’s article, he notes, ‘[T]here was no hint of emotion in Miller’s story … It was a completely factual, professional accounting, written in the measured cadence of a straight news story – no comment, no editorialization, no sob stuff’ (p. 12).
Hohenberg’s anecdote illustrates two key characteristics of professional journalism: First, that reporters encounter events and interactions that produce powerful and visceral human emotions, and second, that their job is frequently to suppress those emotions in themselves and siphon them from their stories. A hallmark of news, particularly in the United States, is detachment, reason, and the logical assembly of facts. American journalists learn this fundamental truth at the earliest stages of their careers: By the time they are cub reporters, they already realize ‘instinctively’ that there is no place for feelings in the news.
This study will show that a dichotomous split exists between news and emotion as defined in US journalism discourse. The entanglement between news and emotion in reporting practice, of course, is complex and rife with exceptions and contradictions. But the evidence herein suggests that professional literature, in the form of educational US journalism textbooks, constructs an ideal wall between ‘hard news’ scenarios that prohibit emotional content and ‘human interest’ stories that emphasize emotional impact but contain little informational or civic value. I argue through close reading of such textbooks dating from 1894 to 2016 that autonomizing the nearly ubiquitous news value of human interest helped to instantiate this dichotomy around the turn of the 20th century, cleaving the once unified concepts of news and feeling into two separate categories in journalistic taxonomy: the serious news story and the frivolous ‘feature’. Human interest is an under-examined concept in news media studies, and the implications of a discourse that defines human interest in opposition to serious news have not been adequately addressed. The purpose of this article is to bring this discourse into relief and highlight its unnaturalness.
As the professional ethos of objectivity took hold in the United States during the first decades of the 20th century (Mari, 2015; Schudson, 1978; Vos, 2012), the news/emotion conceptual split allowed journalists to exercise detachment from stories deemed newsworthy or substantive, while preserving the escape valve of human interest to do the important work of engaging audiences’ emotions. Professional striving for a news/emotion dichotomy has contributed to a US public sphere that stiff-arms everyday citizens from engagement with serious news by enforcing a journalistic voice that stultifies and deadens key information, driving all but the most wonkish of news consumers to sports, entertainment, or other content that aims to engage the spirit as well as the brain. Much recent literature (e.g. Nussbaum, 2013; Papacharissi, 2015; Wahl-Jorgensen, 2018; Wetherell, 2012) has emphasized that engagement in the contemporary public sphere, with its ceaseless and undifferentiated stream of social stimulus, requires recognition of the interaction between affective and rational processing of public affairs information. By calling attention to the discursive segregation of mind and body in professional journalistic pedagogy, this article seeks to stimulate more thoughtful and nuanced approaches in future discourse.
Objectivity and detachment
David T Z Mindich’s (1998) history of the objective ethos emphasizes five characteristics of objective reporting that emerged in the 19th century United States: detachment, nonpartisanship, the inverted pyramid structure, facticity, and balance. Mindich uses the story of James Gordon Bennett’s pioneering penny paper the New York Herald to mark an era of ostensible detachment from aristocratic elitism and political violence and a rhetorical embrace of a more rational, deliberative, and (selectively) inclusive approach to public affairs. As Mindich writes, Bennett’s business and moral victories over his old-style newspaper nemesis James Watson Webb – who thrice physically beat Bennett in 1836 but ultimately lost in the arena of public opinion – ‘show that [Webb] could separate his mind from his body less successfully than Bennett could’ (p. 38), a characterization that signals dichotomous Cartesian rationality and presages the eventual offsetting of ‘human interest’ from newsworthiness. Mindich further argues that a mid-19th century epochal shift toward scientific rationality, the rise of what Michael Schudson called ‘naïve empiricism’ over religiosity (p. 95), and ‘the commodification of news by the telegraph and the press wire services’ (p. 109) contributed to a privileging of facts and information over stories and emotions that intensified around the turn of the 20th century. One marker of this fact-oriented privilege was the widespread adoption in the late 1800s of the inverted pyramid story structure, which ‘supplanted the chronological style of antebellum news writing’ with ‘a system that appears to strip a story of everything but the “facts,” and changes the way we process news’ (Mindich, 1998: 65).
These changes coincided with a decisive shift in the late-19th century in how eligible US citizens participated in public affairs. Schudson (1998) chronicles a reform-oriented push away from patronage-style, party-dominated voting in which citizens openly cast colored ballot ‘tickets’ in socially robust and festive electoral rituals toward elections designed to emphasize private voting driven by citizens acting on personal conscience and interest. The introduction of the secret ‘Australian’ ballot that citizens had to physically mark to replace voting tickets they simply dropped in a box, for instance, ‘transformed voting from a social and public duty to a private right. … The ballot now hailed a private individual making rational choices about political preferences where the party-printed ticket had beckoned with the pleasures of affiliation and comradeship’ (Schudson, 1998: 170). Note Schudson’s language affirming a split in which the new ‘rational’ electoral process supplanted the affective ‘pleasures’ of the old system. This disruption of the civic atmosphere affected people’s relationship with the news, Schudson argues: ‘[T]he act of reading a newspaper and the process of political education changed; the discourse of citizenship and citizenship ideals was transformed’ (p. 147). It was within this context that prevailing journalism practice began to detach emotional content, the building blocks of human interest, from substantial public affairs news.
Human interest and news values
Human interest might be considered the earliest of the news values. Scholarly definitions tie this value not to external events that can be rationally deemed more or less newsworthy due to their urgency, significance, or tangible impact, but rather to internal, presumably universal feelings that help define what it means to be human. ‘Human interest stories’, writes Chalaby (1998), ‘are the journalistic equivalent to earlier forms of popular discourse, sharing the same narrative format and providing the same link to the universal through symbols and allegories’ (p. 102). The first English newspapers trafficked regularly in tales ranging from the sordid to the heartbreaking – stories routinely classified by historians such as Frank (1961) as human interest. Among such stories was ‘the account of a girl who disguised herself as a soldier so she could stay near her lover’ (p. 30), ‘two exciting pages on a London murder trial’ (p. 81), ‘the anecdote of the postman who got so drunk he mistook Wales for Ireland’ (p. 82), and the tale of a child killed by a bear (p. 245).
Many prominent academic taxonomies of news values (e.g. Bednarek and Caple, 2017; Brighton and Foy, 2007; Galtung and Ruge, 1965; Harcup and O’Neill, 2001) do not include human interest as a primary category, despite its longstanding presence in pedagogical reporting and writing textbooks and practical news judgments. The concept also does not appear to be thoroughly explicated in much scholarly journalism literature; rather, it’s usually a taken-for-granted concept used to categorize news values or frames in content analyses or similar work (e.g. Price et al., 1997). Gans (1979) does list human interest among his half-dozen overlapping ‘interesting’ story types. He defines human interest as stories in which ordinary people undergo an unusual experience that evokes audience sympathy, pity, or admiration, such as victims of tragic illnesses or people who act heroically in disasters. Story selectors choose them because they expect the audience to ‘identify’ with a victim or hero; nonetheless, they themselves are often moved. (p. 156)
One in-depth look at human interest is the work of Helen MacGill Hughes (1937, 1981 [1940]), who examined the affective power of human interest to help construct American culture through accessible storytelling, in a way that public affairs reporting could not: ‘[P]aradoxically, it is not the political news that informs people about one another. It is the revelations of private life and those inconsequential items that in the newspaper office are known as human interest stories’ (Hughes, 1937: 73). Hughes attributes the construction of modern human interest news to the penny press pioneers who branched off from elite-centered government and commercial news to attract the working masses pouring into cities in the mid-1800s. She refers to accounts such as Benjamin Day’s New York Sun giving more prominence to a woman being arrested for smoking and dancing on Broadway than news of an impending visit by Henry Clay as ‘the first human interest stories in the American press’ (Hughes, 1981 [1940]: 8). The term ‘human interest stories’, she asserts, was first used in the office of the Sun to designate the chatty little reports of tragic or comic incidents in the lives of the people. … Early newspapers used human interest stories to fill odd corners of space, but Day’s New York Sun was the first to specialize in them. (Hughes, 1981 [1940]: 12–13, 47).
Hughes argues that human interest stories could appeal across the social spectrum: Society news helped feed lower classes’ fascination with the rich, and reporting on slum life sated wealthy residents’ curiosity about the lives of immigrants and the poor. ‘For purposes of the newspaper the city became a laboratory for the concoction of stories’ (Hughes, 1937: 77). It was in this atmosphere, with human interest conceived as the essence of mass-market news values at the end of the 19th century, that the earliest US instructional textbook writers shared their conceptions of what makes news.
Textbooks as sites of knowledge
Journalism textbooks taught in introductory US reporting and writing classes are a particularly useful resource to explore explicit professional conceptualizations of human interest and other factors that constitute news (Cotter, 2010). Half a century before Galtung and Ruge (1965) kicked off a spate of academic taxonomies of news values, US instructional journalism texts were codifying the key characteristics of people, events, and ideas that separated the newsworthy from the ignorable. Human interest is one of seven dominant news values that have been identified and defined in basic US journalism textbooks since the turn of the 20th century (Parks, 2018). The others are timeliness, prominence, proximity, consequence/impact, unusualness, and conflict. Textbook news values are not the only source journalists tap when making news decisions (Berkowitz, 1990), but textbooks constitute key windows into the discourse of professional journalism, both interpreting and representing the contemporary professional ethos (Mari, 2015) and helping to construct journalistic subjectivities. Generally, textbooks encapsulate the cumulative achievements and collected knowledge that perpetuate the dominant paradigms of a given field (Kuhn, 1970). Specifically, journalism textbooks ‘have been one of the ways journalists have passed down their institutional knowledge and beliefs about their social role’ (Mari, 2014: 381).
One aspect of professional journalism often overlooked by journalism textbooks is the ‘emotional labor’ journalists engage in when observing scenes, dealing with sources, and producing news content (Hopper and Huxford, 2017). Such labor takes place when workers ‘enhance, fake, or suppress their emotions based on the display rules or expectations for emotional expression advocated by their profession’ (Hopper and Huxford, 2017: 92). The principles of detachment dictate that journalists should suppress emotional content both in reporting and presenting news stories. Yet the impact of such labor on reporters and editors, or transitively on news audiences who are also encouraged to favor rational processing over emotional responses to the news, is rarely taken up explicitly in instructional journalism texts except as ‘a threat to the demands of professionalism’ (Hopper and Huxford, 2017: 99).
When emotional content is referenced in contemporary US textbooks, it is generally in the context of human interest stories, which can be used ‘to both reflect and stir the emotions of the news audience’ (Hopper and Huxford, 2017: 98) as a function of journalism distinct from public affairs news. The Hohenberg (1983) example above demonstrates the cultural primacy of emotion suppression without directly tackling the risks of such behavior or how public discourse might suffer from journalism that does not take the emotional component of news into account. Below, I present evidence from instructional US journalism textbooks of an early 20th century discursive rupture of emotion from news, precipitating a decades-long division between the human interest elements that vivify everyday experience and the ‘rational’ approach to news content that drains life from the most significant events of the day.
Method
Seventy-five US journalism textbooks published from 1894–2016 – mostly introductory texts for new reporters but including early texts targeting newspaper entrepreneurs and mid-century texts aimed at general audiences – were analyzed for this article. The analysis is part of a larger study (Parks, 2018) focusing on how journalism textbooks have defined news values, and those values’ changing implications for journalistic practice, since the turn of the 20th century. Texts were selected through a combination of sampling methods from extant textbook studies touching several eras encompassed by this study. An exhaustive list of instructional US textbooks published before 1990 was compiled by Mirando (1992), which served as a baseline for Vos’ (2012) study of textbooks’ approach to objectivity through the 1930s. I adopted Vos’ list of texts for this era based on a purposive sample of volumes that had reached a second edition, allowing that such texts would be among the most widely respected and used editions. I used the same procedure to identify textbooks published through the 1980s. For subsequent texts, I used the list compiled by Hopper and Huxford (2017) based on publishers’ recommendations. I gathered books based on availability until I obtained a satisfactory number representing each era.
For the broader interpretive historical review of how professional news values contribute to discourse defining and constraining journalists’ choices, I read each textbook thoroughly for both explicit and implicit news value references, attending to emergent themes that developed through cumulative observations from each subsequent volume. For the present study, I focused on the identification and definition of human interest as a news value and that value’s conceptual relationship to other news selection criteria, which produced findings suggesting human interest’s unique and divergent role in news judgment. I also noted textbooks’ references to emotion, both as experienced by journalists and sources and as applied to content choices, to assess the conditions under which emotional expression is favored and discouraged in journalistic discourse.
Analysis and discussion
Instructional US textbook definitions of human interest are fairly consistent through the 20th century and well into the 21st, which is basically true of the other main news values (Parks, 2018). But almost from the start, human interest stands apart as a flexible alternative to strict judgment standards built into the other values. Human interest, most broadly, constitutes a phenomenon that doesn’t fit other definitions of news that a reporter or editor nevertheless wants to make into a story. Its chief characteristic, in contrast to proper news stories, is emotional content. Among other functions, it allows journalists to justify stories that cannot be rationalized through values of intrinsic newsworthiness, so long as reporters and editors can convince one another, as Gans (1979) indicates, that the story is emotionally moving.
Early human interest: the essence of news
Edwin L. Shuman (1894), whose Steps Into Journalism is a seminal US textbook leading into the modern journalistic era (Mindich, 1998; Mirando, 1992; Schudson, 1978), did not recognize a dichotomous split between news and human interest. Rather, Shuman and immediate successors conceived ‘the human interest’ as the vital essence of news, with judgment flowing from the determination of where human interest lies. ‘People are more important than things’ Shuman writes; ‘the human interest is universal; the interest in science or scenery is limited’ (p. 139). A few years later, Hemstreet (1901) adds, In collecting news, the reporter takes each fact presented and examines it to see that the human interest is there, whether the matter is local or general, whether it will interest many people and to what extent it will interest. (p. 18)
The human interest, then, was the starting place and umbrella for Hemstreet’s implied news judgment criteria: It ‘may be embodied in the unusual or unexpected circumstances surrounding some ordinary happening; something unnatural or appalling; or in a commonplace accident or incident that occurs in a peculiar manner’ (p. 20). For authors such as Shuman and Hemstreet, if there is no human interest, there is no story.
The human interest in these early texts is not sharply defined. It usually manifests in some Dickensian ordeal – a tenement fire, a neighborhood feud, a pathetic suicide. But the concept did not last long into the 20th century as the origin of all news. By the time of McCarthy’s (1906) The Newspaper Worker, human interest had become a distinct rather than encompassing aspect of news judgment, side by side with other elements: News is always heightened in value when it is marked by the novel and the singular, the extraordinary or the unusual. So much there is of the commonplace and conventional in the happenings of the day that editors are forever on the lookout for stories out of the ordinary or that are full of the element of human interest. (p. 16, emphasis added)
Likewise, Ross (1911) tacks human interest onto the end of a list of other news selection criteria: The importance of a story in the eyes of the editor depends on one or more of several considerations – on the property involved, as in a fire or an earthquake; on the number and the prominence of the persons concerned; on the distance of the happening from the place of publication; on the timeliness of the story; on the element of human interest. (pp. 43–44)
Once human interest became a component of news, rather than the essence of news judgment itself, it took on an important role in demarcating and codifying a dichotomous division between types of legitimate journalism. The extent of human interest to be found would henceforth establish whether a story was ‘news’ or a ‘feature’, whether its intended effect was ‘rational’ or ‘emotional’, and whether the subject matter should be treated as ‘important’ or ‘interesting’.
Separating news from emotion
A key element of most instructional textbook definitions of human interest is that it appeals to universal feelings and therefore transcends factual particulars: Although the interests of any individual differ in almost every aspect from the interests of his neighbor, there is one sort of news that interests them both … That is the news that appeals to the emotions, to the heart. It is the news that deals with human life – human nature – human interest news the papers call it. … However trivial may be the event, if it can be described in a way that will make the reader feel the point of view of the human beings who suffered or struggled or died or who were made happy in the event, every other human being will read it with interest. (Hyde, 1912: 17–18)
Ross (1911), like many authors to follow, equates the stories Hyde describes with ‘feature’ stories, and he contrasts the human interest genre with ‘the plain news story’, which is ‘based on a recent happening of more or less importance in itself, as a fire or a business transaction, told without attempt at embellishment’ (pp. 46–47). In making this distinction, Ross (1911) introduces the Cartesian split between ‘plain news’ and ‘human interest’ writing: Stripped to the bare facts, a human-interest story may be without news value; but told with the keen sympathy that comes of accurate observation and a knowledge of human nature it may have an even greater value, that of giving the reader a clearer insight into the real life about him. (p. 47)
Hyde (1912) reinforces the news/emotion split, arguing that ‘the distinguishing marks of the human interest story are its lack of real news value and of conventional form, and its appeal to human emotions’ (p. 234). Many textbooks throughout the 20th century and into the 21st (e.g. Bleyer, 1932; Burken, 1979; Charnley, 1959; Fedler, 1973; Harwood, 1927; Johnson and Harriss, 1952 [1942]; Kolodzy, 2013; Rivers, 1964) make a similar distinction. ‘The element of interest on which news is based, especially where the news is at all important, differs from that of human interest’, write Williams and Martin (1922 [1911]). Human interest is ‘an appeal to the emotional rather than to intellectual appreciation, an appeal to instinct rather than thought’ (p. 177), writes Yost (1924: 36). Yost adds, ‘[T]he term ‘human interest’ is seldom applied to matters of large importance. It pertains more particularly to the sentiments and attractions of social relations, the minor manifestations of humanity or inhumanity, the things that appeal to the heart’ (p. 37). (Harriss et al., 1981) declare, ‘As long as the reporter presents the news as it actually occurs, without any … emotional coloring, he is performing his duty professionally’ (p. 65, emphasis added). Lanson and Stephens (2008) summarize, ‘Readers are not always concerned only with what is most important. Reporters must take into account these human interests’ (p. 9).
Hence, defining language in instructional US textbooks often suggests that a journalistic story may contain either one element – significance – or the other – emotion – but not both. This is mirrored in Hughes’ (1981 [1940]) conceptualization: ‘The human interest story is not news … Beyond the appreciation of it, the story makes no difference to the reader’ (p. 67). The cumulative implication of this discourse is that news and human feeling are incommensurate. Such a suggestion gives human interest a dubious and paradoxical role in the canon of ‘news’ values: It is a staple in lists of characteristics that establish a legitimate story, but it is a news value in the sense that it provides a rationalization for making news out of something that definitionally is not. This discourse both restricts and expands the agency of journalistic decision makers. It constrains the acceptable affective boundaries within which serious news may be conceived and presented, but it retains an outlet for journalistic representations of joy, pathos, and humor.
The most flexible news value
While human interest’s lack of intrinsic newsworthiness and its purely emotional appeal relegate it to second-class status among contemporary news values (Hodgkiss, 2017), it is of high utility in expanding the boundaries of news judgment. Ross (1911) helps set the tone for human interest as a catchall category that allows journalists to bypass other news criteria if they have the talent to whip up an affective response: ‘Almost any subject may be made into a feature story if the writer has the gift of originality’ (p. 48). MacDougall’s (1935 [1932]) sweeping definition – ‘Interest in human beings as such, and in events because they concern men and women in situations which might confront anyone else, is called human interest’ (p. 55) – demonstrates the fungible nature of this news value. By many definitions, human interest can also include compelling circumstances that involve animals: ‘Anything interesting that may happen to the monkeys, or the elephant, the sparrows or the squirrels in the parks, horses or dogs in the street, is used as the excuse for a human interest story’ (Hyde, 1912: 253). Such flexibility transfers the fundamental criteria for judging newsworthiness from the innate characteristics of an event to the reporter or editor’s affective disposition toward it. If the reporter feels a tug and pursues a story, and if the editor is intrigued or moved by the reporter’s tale, the story has human interest appeal. Such appeal, some authors suggest, can be transcendent: For human interest stories the writer must look about for those episodes or passing phases of life from which may be gleaned facts that will awaken in readers a sense of pity, delight, beauty, or pain; above all, that will speak to ‘the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation’. (Robertson, 1930: 140)
Hyde (1912), speaking to the emotional labor performed by journalists, argues that the opportunity to write such openly emotional stories helps to offset hard-nosed reporters’ numbing daily encounters with human tragedy: ‘They are a reaction against cynicism’ (p. 252). But there is evidence that a manipulative and formulaic bent lies behind the conceptualization of human interest items, dating at least to the turn of the 20th century. McCarthy (1906) offers this advice while typologizing news stories: Evictions, Hard Luck and Destitution Stories – In news of this class the reporter always emphasizes the ‘human interest’ and pathetic sides. If the weather is unusually severe, the landlord flinty-hearted, the victims scantily clad and the larder and coal bin empty, the reporter is in his element. How he does work one’s sympathies by contrasting the threadbare shawl of the helpless, shivering mother with the fine, warm ulster of the snug and comfortable looking landlord. (p. 24)
Harwood (1927) offers examples of the kinds of such stories one might find in the courts: The mother who left her child on a doorstep because she could not support it, the small boy who shot his father for abusing his mother, the swindler swindled by a cleverer sharper than himself – all of these situations make interesting reading for the circulation if the reporter has an eye for comedy and pathos. (p. 62)
And Warren (1959) provides a table listing three-part recipes for composing ‘Typical Topics of Human Interest’: Starving mother … deserts baby … kind policeman Alley cat … up a tree … brave fireman Destitute family … father killed … generous neighbors Pigeon flock … attacked by owl … crack marksman Small child … runs away … thoughtful stranger Country visitor … meets slicker … buys bridge Childhood lovers … surprise meeting … happy wedding Amateur gamblers … bet on game … loser barefoot Bored society … treasure hunt … stern judge Boy asleep … imperiled by fire … faithful dog Ill explorer … needs antitoxin … daring flyer (p. 245)
A fundamental purpose of pursuing such human interest formulae is that the affective appeal is widely perceived to attract readers, as opposed to the public affairs subjects presumed to alienate them. In introducing news values, Charnley (1959) portrays a typical (male) reader failing to relate to a political news story, which ‘isn’t real to him’ (p. 40), then engaging with a story about a local high school girl – pictured in a bathing suit – defeating older men in a fishing competition: ‘[T]he image of a high school girl has specific meaning for him – it’s not something off on another planet, like the federal budget. … It is a story about human beings, not about statistics or intellectual concepts’ (Charnley, 1959: 41).
The diminishing role of human interest
As demonstrated above, instructional US textbook evidence suggests that human interest, around the turn of the 20th century, was practically synonymous with news, before splitting off into a separate concept that helped maintain flexibility in news judgment and regulate the emotional detachment increasingly enforced within ‘objective’ news stories. It is also the case that human interest has been a consistently enumerated news value throughout my 122-year textbook sample. However, analysis suggests that human interest’s importance as a news value diminished over the course of the 20th century, in roughly the proportion that conflict as an explicit value increased. One explanation for this change is the increased journalistic commitment to public affairs news and efforts to explain the world as the 20th century matured, and the transfer of conflict from the small-scale narratives of human interest stories to institutional-level clashes and strategy-oriented frames in public affairs reporting (Barnhurst and Mutz, 1997). Textbook author Yost (1924) makes a transitional conceptual link between conflict and human interest, arguing, ‘Whether the contest is one of skill or of strength, one of principles or of force, whether it is material, intellectual or spiritual, the fight’s the thing that appeals most strongly to human interest’ (p. 36).
The kind of conflict that began to dominate news stories in the middle decades of the 20th century, rather than personal, emotionally driven human dramas, was the newsy, ‘rational’ clash of competing political forces, and the strategic moves they undertook to manipulate levers of power. Commensurately, news topics expanded from the one-off events of bar brawls and tenement fires in early 20th century texts to public affairs–related news beats such as City Hall, state houses, school boards, and so on, in addition to reporting specializations such as religion and the environment. By the late 1900s and early 2000s, as US professional journalism doubled down on ‘objectivity’ and reportorial detachment, direct appeals to emotion and affect – the principal driver of news judgment in the early texts – receded. Human interest remained nominally on many textbooks’ lists of values, but its appearance was more spotty and merited reduced explication and examples in later texts. Some 21st-century textbooks characterize human interest as a distraction, arguing that it ‘is valued too highly, leading to important stories being pushed out of the news by emotional stories of little consequence’ (Lieb, 2009: 29).
This is a sharp tonal shift from the first third of the 20th century, which supported a much broader view of what could constitute a valid human interest story. By allowing that human interest bore no burden of significance or newsworthiness, even the most apparently trivial matters and moments could be elevated into stories by the sensitive reporter: An incident in a crowded street car, a mishap on the street, a bit of conversation between two small boys, a mistake made by a countryman unaccustomed to the ways of the metropolis, or any one of the hundred little episodes in the daily life of the city may be taken by the reporter as the subject for a human interest story. (Bleyer, 1932: 318)
Such small-scale slices of life, now rare in organized news reports, lent a sense of discovery and surprise to the early 20th-century newspaper and vitalized a journalism of serendipity that has since been largely overtaken by heavily scripted, but easy to cover, pseudo-events (Parks, 2017a). As Barnhurst and Mutz (1997: 50) put it, whereas ‘recent stories are fiercely dull’, turn-of-the-20th-century stories narrating individual acts and discrete events could be ‘riveting’. These kinds of personal stories now are more likely to originate not in legacy media but with ordinary people who share an experience on social media (e.g. Cliffe, 2017), where if it catches the right affective wave it could become viral (Parks, 2017b; Berger and Milkman, 2012).
Human interest and creativity in newswriting
The dichotomy between news and emotion in conceiving news stories extends to their execution. Textbooks give reporters more leeway to be emotive and creative in writing stories of human interest than of public affairs or spot news, although the advice is often ambivalent and self-contradictory, demonstrating gaps in the conceptual border between news and human interest. Hohenberg, whose 1983 edition provided the anecdotal introduction to this article, appears in his 1962 (1960) edition to be unsympathetic even to threads of warmth or creativity in journalism: ‘The old careless flamboyance that was the trademark of colorful American news writing earlier in this century now seems dated. Accuracy, clarity, good judgment, and responsibility are the characteristics of the news writing of today’ (p. 32). Yet in his 1978 edition, Hohenberg writes, ‘There is nothing static or stylized about the news; nor, for that matter, should there be any rigid rules and decrees for writing about it’ (p. 87). Hough (1975) writes, ‘News writing demands discipline, but it also demands imagination, perception, humor, sympathy and taste’ (p. 18). He suggests that reporters ‘should not be afraid to experiment’ with their writing (p. 96). Meanwhile, Fedler (1973) states flatly that ‘newswriters are reporters, not creative writers’ (p. 15) then ironically appears to lament that although ‘[d]escriptions … make a news story more interesting and help recreate the scene in the minds of readers. … [R]eporters … seldom describe what they see, feel, taste or smell’ (p. 61). Harrower (2010) argues, ‘When you write news stories about fires or city council meetings, you don’t try to jazz things up. You write simple declarative sentences in a solemn, objective tone. Just the facts: no flash, please’ (p. 120). Yet Brooks et al. (2008) write, ‘Even when covering routine, boring events, you are allowed to use your creativity’ (p. 260). A copy editor is quoted saying, ‘News organizations aren’t in the business of publishing stream-of-consciousness musings’ (Scanlan and Craig, 2014: 184–185). Stovall (2002) argues that on deadline, ‘A writer will find it easier to write things as he or she has done it before, rather than to be creative or to let the content of the writing dictate the form’ (p. 130). Mencher (1991) admonishes that it’s ‘fine when a Dylan Thomas plays with words, but it is dangerous for a journalist, whose first allegiance is to straight-forward meaning’ (p. 134).
Textbook authors skeptical of innovation or imagination in newswriting almost universally loosen up when discussing human interest, which Hyde (1912) describes as ‘a class of newspaper stories in which we are given absolute freedom from conventional formulas’ (p. 233). Fedler (1973) says, ‘You should not attempt to persuade or advocate in a feature story, but you can report your own emotions and impressions and make reasonable judgments …’ (p. 205). For Izard et al. (1973), ‘The feature writer has almost complete freedom’ (p. 175). Editors, Harrower (2010) says, ‘won’t go freakin’ nuts if you use slang or contractions’ (p. 210) in features. A similar sheen applies to sports reporting, where ‘reporters are permitted to express themselves much more freely than in covering other types of news. What they think is as important sometimes as what they saw’ (Wolseley and Campbell, 1949: 333–334). The sports pages feature ‘an informality and originality of language which would scandalize readers if found in the regular news sections’ (MacDougall, 1938: 543). Rivers (1964) summarizes, ‘The newspaper reporter who covers a speech is not allowed to describe the speaker as “persuasive” or “eloquent,” but the sports writer reporting a football game need not hesitate to describe a ballcarrier as ‘elusive’ or “ghost-like”’ (p. 205).
As I have shown, human interest stories are typically defined as lacking significance (see Hughes, 1981 [1940]). Textbook prescriptions confining creative or colorful writing to feature or sports stories, then, reinforce the conceptual suggestion that important or meaningful news must be presented as rational and dull. Only occasionally have textbooks across the decades acknowledged that human interest elements can add value to more ‘newsworthy’ stories: ‘Very frequently the reporter can create interest in social, economic, scientific, or technical matters by developing first the human interest phases of the subject and then passing on to an explanation of the more significant aspects of it’ (Bleyer, 1932: 43). Williams and Martin (1922 [1911]) write that ‘the reporter should learn to watch for the little details of human interest that add to the effectiveness of news stories’ (p. 179) such as a statesman peeling his third banana as he discusses the merits of a bill. Such a detail ‘did not add to the importance of the story as news, but it did add to its effectiveness’. Metz (1977) suggests that human interest can draw attention to stories such as overseas disasters that lack dominant news values: ‘[E]mpathy can overcome linear distance to provide a feeling of proximity’ (p. 7).
But even in cases where human interest elements are invited into public affairs news stories, the conceptual dichotomy is preserved. The idea that significance bears its own affective weight – that federal budgets, depicted as cold and alien by Charnley (1959), are ultimately about human conflict, striving, anxiety, joy, and sorrow – is rarely entertained. In the Williams and Martin (1922 [1911]) example above, the banana peeling is human interest; the human impact of the pending legislation is not. Hohenberg (1962 [1960]) writes that the human interest element in the news is being included more and more in situations that used to call for the simple declarative sentences of straight news handling. This is basically a matter of broadening reporting, of doing something more than merely recording events. (p. 183)
But Hohenberg also continues to police the line between matters of fact and matters of affect, arguing, A complicated development in economics, such as the effect of the raising of the prime interest rate and its impact on the economy, necessarily must be told far differently from a human interest story about a blind woman student who has just received her M.D. (Hohenberg, 1978: 128, emphasis added)
This longstanding, and largely unexamined, assumption that complex news of widespread impact cannot be told through the animating techniques of human interest reporting has had powerful implications for US citizens’ experience of the news for decades.
Conclusion
In this article, I examined human interest, a particularly enigmatic news value described and exemplified in the instructional US journalism textbooks that distill and reproduce the professional discourse in which journalists make news decisions. Human interest at the turn of the 20th century was the central functional news value – considered the essence of newsworthiness in a transitional era when news mostly meant telling dramatic stories to the masses before journalists embraced the professionalized role of delivering civic intelligence to citizen-voters. Human interest has persisted as an explicit news value: Its focus on emotional content to the exclusion of significance or relevance has remained constant, eliding the natural connection between the important and the affective, the interplay between rational cognition and emotional reaction inherent in forming political attitudes and behaviors (Papacharissi, 2015). But while the conceptualization of human interest as a uniquely emotion-laden value that journalists may apply to otherwise newsless occurrences has remained constant, its relative significance in news judgment diminished over the course of the 20th century. This change coincided with mainstream journalism’s increasing concern with reporting official news, monitoring government activities, and conceiving conflict as a series of institutional and political clashes more than the daily inter- or intra-personal struggles so often featured in the late 1800s and early 1900s (Barnhurst and Mutz, 1997). In a study of news values in contemporary textbooks, including many volumes outside my sample, Hodgkiss (2017) concludes, ‘Several of the authors suggest that human interest/emotional stories [are] second-tier stories. … [W]hile audiences or readers might find human interest stories appealing, editors and reporters do not place these items high on the newsworthiness and selection scale’ (p. 76). Recent trends in data journalism, which have led to increased quantification of news at the expense of personal human experiences (Lowrey and Hou, 2018), bear out this conclusion.
Cordoning off the emotional aspects of human endeavor in a single news value has allowed the other dominant values – timeliness, prominence, proximity, unusualness, impact, conflict – to serve the central professional ethos of detached ‘objectivity’, suffused in modern rationalism and applied to any news deemed to be important or in the public interest. Such a division of labor in news conception helped produce a century’s worth of important news stripped of affective appeal and emotional entry points, cuing audiences to adopt the same detachment from public affairs that journalists imposed on themselves to remain ostensibly impartial.
Mounting evidence indicates that trying to separate thought and emotion is not conducive to engaged civic behavior (e.g. Richards, 2004), supporting Barnhurst’s (2015) argument that ‘modern news at the height of its power likely dampened public engagement’ (p. 1244). Contemporary research indicates that emotional content increases people’s connection with substantive news and helps them empathize with the struggles of people affected by social issues and policy choices. As Grabe et al. (2017) summarize, [P]rominent strands of media research depart from the ontological position that rational thought – afforded by factual information – leads to active citizenship. At the same time, there is growing evidence that other journalistic formats that feature the emotional dimensions of news stories can augment audience understanding, awareness, and engagement with sociopolitical issues. (p. 908)
This study is not an exhaustive review of conceptions of human interest in professional discourse, nor does it analyze actual journalistic content for affective characteristics through the 20th century. The study’s contribution is to foreground longitudinal patterns in US journalistic discourse that encourage journalists – and by extension, citizens – to separate emotional energy from important issues and events. By historicizing the discursive split of human interest from significant news, this study might support a reintegration of affective presentation and substantive news in journalistic practice and research emphasis. Journalists today need not be bound by traditions codified a century ago in a different epistemological era for an emerging mass media with unique commercial affordances and demands that no longer exist.
