something will be is determined by the reporter's or the editor's appreciation of what will appeal to the average reader as the most marked departure from the customary and the expected. If, as in a recent accident, the front trucks of a trolley car jump the track and upset a baby carriage, throwing out the baby; and if the baby alights unharmed on a pillow that was tossed out of the carriage by the collision, such peculiar circumstances the reporter knows will appeal to most readers as the interesting feature of the accident. That a sneak thief should be caught as he was escaping from a house with a few dollars' worth of plunder, will attract the average reader much less than the fact that he jumped through a plate-glass window in his effort to escape, or that he gained access to the house by wearing a Salvation Army uniform, or that he carried away a pie as part of his booty. How a man lost a purse containing $50 is scarcely worthy of notice, but how, while looking for his purse, he found a diamond ring, is strange enough to make good reading. A lecture at an agricultural society meeting on the advantages to the farmers of the state of raising barley would not ordinarily be considered of much interest to city readers, but an interruption of the lecture by an advocate of prohibition with the charge that to urge barley growing is to aid the brewing interests, might make a good news story. The character and the extent of the departure from the usual, considered from the point of view of most of the readers, measure the news value of any phase of an event that is out of the ordinary.
Struggles for Supremacy. Struggles for supremacy, also, have an almost universal appeal. Competition in business, contest in sport, rivalry in politics, are based on the love of fighting to win. Strikes and lockouts, as part of the contest between labor and capital,
