TY  - JOUR
PY  - 1936//
TI  - The Lindbergh Case: A Study of Human Interest and Politics
JO  - American journal of sociology
A1  - Hughes, Helen MacGill
SP  - 32
EP  - 54
VL  - 42
IS  - 1
N2  - The American newspaperman's view of the Lindbergh case as "the greatest human-interest story of the decade" is rooted in a conception of the newspaper as something to interest everyone. But in the Berlin press of 1932 it was reported in four forms, corresponding to four different types of journal: the sermon, i.e., the propagandizing accounts printed int he uncompromising communist organ; the bulletin, i.e., the concise factual reports in the organs of less doctrinaire parties and in the voluntary press of opinion, which formulated the event as news of interest to citizens and men of affairs only as a practical problem in crime-detection; the human-interest story, which disclosed the personal experience of the participants in the news and made it comprehensible to every reader as a person; and, finally, the thriller, a form designed for sale among the numerous diversion-seeking public of the boulevards. The form of the news was thus determined by the newspaper's conception of its role in the daily lives of its readers. Human interest does not lie in the intrinsic nature of an event; it depends upon a relation between journal and reader.<p />
LA  - 
SN  - 0002-9602
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/217329
ID  - ref1
ER  -