than a century of telegraph news reporting, nobody has seen 
that “human interest” is the electronic or depth dimension of 
immediate involvement in news. With telegraph, there ended 
that separation of interests and division of faculties that are 
certainly not without their magnificent monuments of toil and 
ingenuity. But with telegraph, came the integral insistence and 
wholeness of Dickens, and of Florence Nightingale, and of 
Harriet Beecher Stowe. The electric gives powerful voices to the 
weak and suffering, and sweeps aside the bureaucratic 
specialisms and job descriptions of the mind tied to a manual 
of instructions. The “human interest” dimension is simply that 
of immediacy of participation in the experience of others that 
occurs with instant information. People become instant, too, in 
their response of pity or of fury when they must share the 
common extension of the central nervous system with the 
whole of mankind. Under these conditions, “conspicuous