The field is not an unprofitable one even in the mercenary sense.  To higher motives the task of popularizing science makes a still stronger appeal.  Ignorance is the source of most of our ills.  Ignorant we must always be of much that we need to know, but there is no excuse for remaining ignorant of what somebody on earth knows or has known.  Rich treasure lies hidden in what President Gilman called “the bibliothecal cairn” of scientific monographs which piles up about a university.  The journalist might well exchange the muckrake for the pick and dig it out.

Nothing could accelerate human progress more than to reduce the time between the discovery of a new truth and its application to the needs of mankind....  It is regarded as a great journalistic achievement when the time of transmission of a cablegram is shortened.  But how much more important it is to gain a few years in learning what the men who are in advance of their age are doing than to gain a few seconds in learning what the people of Europe are doing?  This lag in intellectual progress ... is something which it is the especial duty of the journalist to remove.  He likes to score a beat of a few hours.  Very well, if he will turn his attention to science, he can often score a beat of ten years.

The three main sources, therefore, of subjects and material for special feature and magazine articles are (1) personal observation and experience, (2) newspapers, (3) scientific and technical publications and official reports.

PERSONAL OBSERVATION.  How a writer may discover subjects for newspaper feature articles in the course of his daily routine by being alive to the possibilities around him can best be shown by concrete examples.

A “community sing” in a public park gave a woman writer a good subject for a special article published in the Philadelphia North American.

In the publication of a city directory was found a timely subject for an article on the task of getting out the annual directory in a large city; the story was printed in a Sunday issue of the Boston Herald.

A glimpse of some children dressed like Arctic explorers in an outdoor school in Kansas City was evidently the origin of a special feature story on that institution, which was published in the Kansas City Star.

A woman standing guard one evening over a partially completed school building in Seattle suggested a special feature in the Seattle Post Intelligencer on the unusual occupation of night “watchman” for a woman.

While making a purchase in a drug store, a writer overheard a clerk make a request for a deposit from a woman who desired to have a prescription filled, an incident which led him to write a special feature for the New York Times on this method of discouraging persons from adding to the drug store’s “morgue” of unclaimed prescriptions.

From a visit to the Children’s Museum in Brooklyn was developed a feature article for the New York Herald, and from a story-telling hour at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts was evolved a feature story for the Boston Herald on the telling of stories as a means of interesting children in pictures.