It is interesting to see what in any given newspaper story can be followed up for a later story. The would-be reporter may get good practice in writing follow-up stories from the mere attempt to study out the next step in any given new story. With this next step as his feature he may try to write a follow-up story without additional information, and then compare it with other follow-up stories. For every news story contains within it clues to what may be expected to follow.
When any serious fire occurs certain additional facts may always be expected to follow. The finding of more dead, the unravelling of a mysterious origin, the re-statement of the loss, and the present condition of the injured are some of the possibilities that a rewrite man considers when he tries to prepare a follow-up story on a fire. The Washington Place fire in New York on March 25, 1911, furnished admirable material for the study of the rewriting of fire stories. The fire occurred on Saturday afternoon too late for anything but the Sunday editions. The original story as it appeared in the Sunday papers and the Monday issues, of papers which had no Sunday editions, began like this:
| One hundred and forty-one persons are | |dead as a result of a fire which on | |Saturday afternoon swept the three upper | |floors of the factory loft building at | |the northwest corner of Washington place | |and Greene street. More than | |three-quarters of this number are women | |and girls, who were employed in the | |Triangle Shirt Waist factory, where the | |fire originated.--_Boston Transcript, | |Monday._ |
The Monday stories on the fire followed up various phases as shown in the following. Each one while indicating that the story was a follow-up retold the principal incidents in the fire.
| The death list in the Washington place | |and Greene street fire was swelled today | |to 145, a majority of the victims being | |young girls.--_Monday morning--second | |story._ |
| At dawn today it was estimated that | |25,000 persons had visited the temporary | |morgue on the covered pier at the foot of| |East Twenty-sixth street, set aside to | |receive the bodies of those who perished | |in the Washington place fire on Saturday | |afternoon.--_Monday morning--second | |story._ |