To gain experience and impressions for their articles, special writers
on newspapers even assume temporarily the roles of persons whose lives
and experiences they desire to portray. One Chicago paper featured every
Sunday for many weeks articles by a reporter who, in order to get
material, did a variety of things just for one day, from playing in a
strolling street band to impersonating a convict in the state
penitentiary. Thirty years ago, when women first entered the newspaper
field as special feature writers, they were sometimes sent out on
"freak" assignments for special features, such as feigning injury or
insanity in order to gain entrance to hospitals in the guise of
patients. Recently one woman writer posed as an applicant for a position
as moving-picture actress; another applied for a place as housemaid; a
third donned overalls and sorted scrap-iron all day in the yard of a
factory; and still another accompanied a store detective on his rounds
in order to discover the methods of shop-lifting with which department
stores have to contend.

It is not necessary, however, to go so far afield to obtain personal
experiences, as is shown by the following newspaper and magazine
articles based on what the writers found in the course of their everyday
pursuits.

The results obtained from cultivating a quarter-acre lot in the
residence district of a city of 100,000 population were told by a writer
in the _Country Gentleman_.

A woman's experience with bees was related in _Good Housekeeping_ under
the title, "What I Did with Bees."