local histories and partly from interviews with "old inhabitants." A brief announcement of the death of an old-time circus clown might lead the reporter to write an entertaining "human interest" story of his career from facts secured from the clown's friends. By spending a few hours watching the building of a big tunnel under a river, and by talking to the superintendent and the workmen, a reporter could work up a good story on the undertaking.
The popularizing of scientific and technical material affords excellent opportunity to a writer whose college training or practical experience has familiarized him with special fields. A new theory in regard to the construction of airships presented before a learned society in a paper on "Some Principles of Aerodynamics," might make an excellent popular article if the reporter were able to present the new idea in a simple, concrete, and interesting manner. The effect of using up the phosphorus in soil under cultivation, as discussed in an agricultural experiment station report, may seem to be a subject of little interest to the average reader, but an explanation by specific examples of the results of this exhaustion of phosphorus upon the cost of living and upon the welfare of the race, may be made a readable story. To explain clearly how the transmission of the germ of infantile paralysis by means of the ordinary house fly is being determined by laboratory experiments, requires knowledge of bacteriology. For a writer familiar with electricity and its application in the telephone, the problem of explaining in an interesting manner a new device for wireless telephony is less difficult than for one who knows little about the subject. Many writers specialize in the particular field in which they are most interested, and present in popular form all the available new material in this field.
