There have been many great tributes posted about the death of food writer Marion Cunningham. She was best known for rewriting the Fannie Farmer cookbook. This is from the NY Times obituary: “Mr. Beard took to this tall, blue-eyed homemaker, and for the next 11 years she was his assistant, helping him establish cooking classes in the Bay Area. The job gave her a ringside seat to a period in American cooking when regional food, organic produce and a new way of cooking and eating were just becoming part of the culinary dialogue. Her association with Mr. Beard also gave her the big break of her career, in the late…

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…

I enjoyed this Michele Weldon column in the Huff Post about Nora Ephron who I mentioned in an earlier post about her role as a food writer: “I did not want to uncover wrongs, chase fires, topple governments or even stay up all night waiting for a secret call. I wanted to write essays, columns, features, profiles, trend stories and books, digging into popular culture and honoring the sanctity of individual stories — even my own. I wanted to correct persistent ill-conceived notions through a personal lens, framed by my own experiences with wit and savvy intelligence that was part Erma Bombeck — but wickedly cool. I wanted to be Nora Ephron.”This concept is…

I am almost done writing a book chapter for a book about gossip. The book will be called: When Private Talk Goes Public: Gossip in United States History. Here is more about it. My chapter is an examination of the role of gossip in the women’s pages of newspapers in the 1950s and 1960s, looking at a political column, an advice column and society and wedding news. In doing so, the concept of “quilted news,” a mix of soft and hard news is introduced. What this quilted approach reveals is how the race and gender roles were changing in the 1950s and 1960s which was clearly reflected in the women’s pages.…

Yay! My 2011 AEJMC paper, “The Wizard of the Women’s Pages: Raising the Curtain on Paul Myhre, the Man Behind the Penney-Missouri Awards and the Network of Women It Fostered” is going to be published in next year’s American Journalism journal. As director of the Penney-Missouri Awards, Paul Myhre was a significant figure in raising the standards for and promoting women’s pages.  Above is my Paul wearing the cute onsie sent by the son of baby Paul’s namesake.

Bridal News in the Women’s Pages As researcher Erika Engstrom noted in her work: “Published gossip in the form of wedding announcements thus provides a record of social life.”[i]And those announcements and accompanying stories have a long history. According to a book about the media and weddings: “The appeal of weddings as news finds its origins as far back as written news has existed. In addition to their newsworthiness, accounts of weddings of the politically important or of popular movie stars have included gossipy details of the most intricate and minute aspects.”[ii]In the 1940s, scholars looked to the weddings announcements of the New York Times to evaluate the role of…