Human interest stories add a personal touch to news, often featuring interviews with those affected or reporting on people facing challenges. They can be emotional or entertaining and are often included in news sources to increase audience engagement. While they may not be objective journalism, they offer a break from traditional news reporting.
A lot of news stories focus on presenting facts and statistics, which can get a bit boring unless someone has a keen interest in the topic. While people might be very interested in the latest presidential polls, something that could cause cancer, a food recall, or what the weather will be like tomorrow, news sources like newspapers, magazines, and TV shows might also want to put a “human face” on them. on the news by covering a story in more depth. Sometimes called the story behind the story or an emotional news story, the human interest story can look at the news in a more personal way, especially by interviewing those affected or creating a report on one or more people facing challenges that have been covered in the news . The goal is to involve us emotionally in the presentation of the new products.
It is common to see at least one human interest story on a nightly news or morning paper. A newspaper might cover home foreclosure rates and have an article covering statistics about them. To flesh out this story and offer more coverage, it could then feature an article about some people in the neighborhood experiencing a home foreclosure. The focus would be on the personal effects of such a difficult experience and could increase readers’ understanding of how the home foreclosure “facts and numbers” were really playing out in their community.
Unlike direct journalism, where reporters are hoped to remain objective, these emotional stories can be written more flexibly. Sometimes, the details are so intense, that the journalist hardly needs to include any editorial information. Other times, the coverage has a hard slant, and the decision to include this type of story to enrich other reporting may be a deliberate one. Putting a human face on bare facts can prompt an audience to react a certain way and push an agenda from the media source that is by no means objective. It is argued that these stories should by no means be included in objective journalism, but many people find them useful, heartwarming, or amusing diversions from bare-fact news reporting.
A human interest story doesn’t have to be deeply moving and can be added more for entertainment value. A news story about a presidential candidate’s favorite vegetable or his daily workout isn’t really “news” in the traditional sense. Other stories that may make it into the news may be unrelated to the news content and provide a much-needed break from the “if it bleeds it leads” style of journalism. For example, Anton the Amazing Squirrel learning how to build with dominoes, could be added as a story that adds levity to a broadcast or newspaper dealing mostly with homicides, dangerous statistics, and reporting on the bad aspects of the country.
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