The St. Petersburg Times, Anne Rowe and DAY
I am finishing up a paper about the elimination of the women’s pages and the introduction of a newsfeature section at the St. Petersburg Times in 1969. It was overseen by Anne Rowe – pictured above. (Her work is often overshadowed by Ben Bradlee’s work creating a Style section at the Washington Post which predated the change at the Times by a few months.) It was the beginning of change for women in journalism and Rowe deserves more credit.
This is how the paper begins:
It was April 1964 and five young journalists from St. Petersburg were gathered in a hotel room on the Gulf Beaches. Known as the “Filthy Five,” they were surrounded by examples of different afternoon newspapers from across the country and old copies of their own newspaper – the daily Evening Independent – a newspaper owned by the St. Petersburg Times. The meeting was the result of women’s page editor Anne Rowe speaking with Executive Editor Don Baldwin about how to improve the afternoon newspaper. She wrote to a friend: “The intent was to make it a strictly local newspaper. We never quite made it. And we found it wasn’t selling because readers were saying there was too much duplication in the Times and the Independent.”[i]
The Filthy Five – which included Rowe – spent three days at the hotel. They began on a Monday morning talking about the newspaper’s mission. They felt that as the Times became more of a statewide newspaper, there was less city coverage. This is where the Independent would excel – truly local coverage. They brainstormed everything from news approach to layout to personnel. Rowe wrote of the experience: “For those three days we lived and breathed that new Independent. It really was a marvelous experience.”[ii] They returned from the beach and heard nothing initially. After a few weeks, changes in staffing began. She wrote to a friend: “Now all we can do is wait and see. It could flop. It’s so different. Whether the Independent is successful or not, it was great fun to do something different and it’s been a real challenge.”[iii] For Rowe it was a lesson in creativity and management.
By April 1969, she put that knowledge and experience to work in what was really a revolution in newspapers: replacing women’s pages with a lifestyle section. At some newspapers, there was a change in name only and the traditional content continued. But at the St. Petersburg Times, there was real change and the newspaper became a leader in a new form of journalism: the introduction of the DAY section.
[i] Anne Rowe letter to Paul Myhre, August 31, 1964. Papers of the Penney-Missouri Awards, Western Historical Manuscript Collection, Missouri Historical Society.
[ii] Anne Rowe letter to Paul Myhre, August 31, 1964. Papers of the Penney-Missouri Awards, Western Historical Manuscript Collection, Missouri Historical Society.
[iii] Anne Rowe letter to Paul Myhre, August 31, 1964. Papers of the Penney-Missouri Awards, Western Historical Manuscript Collection, Missouri Historical Society.
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