Washington Post Style section
I have been writing about Anne Rowe Goldman and her role in creating the DAY section which replaced the women’s page at the St. Petersburg Times in 1969. I have some industry articles and a few of her letters which describe the trailblazing section.
Typically, Ben Bradlee and the Washington Post gets credit for creating the first lifestyle section – known as Style. In the book above, Bradlee wrote that the only fight he even got into with Publisher Katharine Graham was about the creation of the Style section.
While Bradlee gets mentioned most often by journalism historians, Rowe and her editors were doing the same things with the transformation of their women’s pages- maybe even better than the Post – at the same time.
One thing I did find interesting in re-reading Bradlee’s book is his admission that the Post did not test the recipes that ran in its women’s section. This makes what the food editors were doing with test kitchens at the Chicago Tribune and Milwaukee Journal even more significant.