The awk extraction and reporting language is line orientated. This means that [[newline?]] characters cannot be used to create a line break at arbitary locations. In traditional awk implementations a [[newline?]] character can be inserted at the end of a [[command?]] or following squiggly [[braces?]], where whitespace would typically be placed:
# It is best to split a line at whitespace points /foobar/ \ { print $1 }