The obituary usually ends with a list of surviving relatives--especially children and very often the funeral arrangements are included. This is the last paragraph of another obituary:
| His first wife, Mary V. Blank, died in | |1872. Three years later he married Mrs. | |Sarah A. Blank, of Hightstown, N. J., who| |with four daughters, survives him. The | |funeral will be held tomorrow at 11:30 | |o'clock. The burial will be in the family| |plot in Greenwood Cemetery. |
This is the standard form of the obituary which is followed by most daily newspapers in fair-sized cities. The form is characterized by an extreme conciseness and brevity and an absolutely impersonal tone. Very rightly, an obituary is handled with a sense of the sanctified character of its subject It offers no opportunity for fine writing or human interest; it simply gives the facts as briefly and impersonally as possible.
Division of labor on the larger American newspapers has made the reporting of athletic and sporting events into a separate department under a separate editor. The pink or green sporting sheets of the big papers have become separate little newspapers in themselves handled by a sporting editor and his staff and entirely devoted to athletic news, except when padded out with left-over stories from other pages. Although on smaller papers any reporter may be called upon to cover an athletic event, in the cities such news is handled entirely by experts who are thoroughly acquainted with all phases of the athletic sports about which they write. The stories on the pink sheet enjoy the greatest unconventionality of form to be seen anywhere in the paper except on the editorial page. And yet, because athletic reporters are usually men taken from regular reporting and because the same ideas and necessities of news values govern the sporting pages, athletic stories follow, in general, the usual news story form.
One may expect to find under the head of sports almost any news that is any way connected with college, amateur, or professional athletics. The stories include accounts of baseball and football games, rowing, horse racing, track meets, boxing, and many other forms of sport, as well as any discussions or movements growing out of these sports. Many of the stories are only a few lines in length while others may cover a column or more. But in general each one has a lead which answers the questions _when?_ _where?_ _how?_ _who?_ and _why?_ and runs along much like an ordinary news story. For, after all, even athletic stories are written to attract and to hold the reader's interest whether or not he is directly interested in the sport under discussion. Any reporter who is called upon to cover an athletic event is safe in writing his story in the usual news story form.