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…

Slate posted an article today about the death of cookbooks. I don’t quite buy the author’s premise but we have seen a significant shift in how cookbooks have changed – especially in who writes them. For many years, the food editors of newspapers (found in the women’s pages) would write and/or edit cookbooks – examples include Jane Nickerson, Dorothee Paulson and Peggy Daum. Jeanne Voltz wrote several cookbooks while at the Miami Herald and then the Los Angeles Times. Other than the New York Times, few newspapers publish cookbooks anymore. I interviewed cookbook author Jean Anderson a few years ago who said that today, publishers are only interested in cookbooks…

Happy Father’s Day to Lance who knows almost as much about the women’s pages as I do.