The Importance of Weddings Coverage
I loved this New York Times wedding story from yesterday that is getting a lot of buzz. From the story: “The bride, 97, is keeping her name.”
While often overlooked as soft news, wedding stories can have value. They were a key part of the women’s pages for decades. As Chicago Editor Colleen “Koky” Dishon noted: “As we wrote about weddings and births and debutante balls, we learned about the importance of rites and rituals in people’s lives.” And there were journalism lessons in reporting about those rituals in the lives of women. Fort Lauderdale News women’s page editor Edee Greene pointed out that writing up engagement and wedding announcements provided “invaluable training in accuracy.”
Racism coverage was blatant in the coverage of weddings. For example, black brides were simply not included in the women’s pages. At times it was policy and at other newspapers it was practice. In the late 1950s, under Drue Lytle’s women’s page editorship, it was the fight for Filipino brides to be featured in the pages of the Honolulu Advertiser for the first time.
It was in the 1950s that women’s page editor Marjorie Paxson began publishing pictures of black brides in the Houston Chronicle, according to Paxson. She attributed many of the changes that occurred in her section to changes in the community: “It was more a matter of let’s keep up with the times and stay current. It was clear that our coverage would need to change.”
