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The importance of the telling detail cannot be underestimated. In it lies the difference between merely telling a story and bringing a story to life. It can illustrate a scene as clearly as a photograph, and in so doing it propels the reader into the event, coloring his imagination with sensory experiences; the sights and sounds can become as real as if he had been present for it.

In the history of journalism, some reporters have stood as giants of the telling detail. Edward R. Murrow, one of broadcast journalism's most respected names, used it with seeming effortlessness. Covering the German bombing of London in World War II for CBS radio, his broadcast of September 25, 1940 was brought to life for American listeners by virtue of the brilliant recounting of his own sensory experiences. In one instance, he described a stroll through the wreckage: "The gutters were full of glass; the big red buses couldn't pull into the curb. There was the harsh, grating sound of glass being shoveled into trucks" (Serrin 283). The reader can easily imagine the shards and chips of shattered, dirty glass; he can almost see the face of the frustrated bus driver, and his ears ache with the violence of the noisy trucks as they clear the gutters.
In the same broadcast, Murrow describes his encounter with some women who had been driven from their homes by the bombing. "One clutched a blanket, another carried a small baby in her arms, and another carried an aluminum cooking pot in her left hand" (Serrin 282). It is possible for the imaginative reader to interpret the states of mind of these three women based solely on those small but revealing details; for instance, the last of the three may very well have been so shocked that she simply fled her home with what she was holding, the aluminum pot, when the bombs fell, and she had not yet released it. That Murrow included the detail of which hand she used to hold the pot adds an even greater sense of reality to the moment.
Being present at the scene of a tragedy enables reporters to paint a clearer picture of its true horror. William G. Shepherd happened to be walking through Washington Square in New York City on May 27, 1911, where he witnessed the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist fire. His telling of the story, nearly a century later, can still bring tears to a reader's eyes. "A policemanwent about with tags, which he fastenedto the wrists of the dead girls numbering each with a lead pencil, and I saw him fasten tag no. 54 to the wrist of

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