lifestyle journalism

Lifestyle sections generally were introduced into American daily newspapers in the 1970s and typically evolved from what had been styled as women’s pages. Despite an assumption that we can all identify what lifestyle journalism might mean, most newspaper definitions are still in flux as editors seek to define what it is that readers might want to read (and what advertisers will support). Some papers have lifestyle sections that could be defined as entertainment or celebrity-driven—not much of a change in philosophy from the old women’s/society sections, which concentrated on the doings of the local rich and influential. Publishers sometimes include lifestyle sections separately or have them classified as part of feature pages. Sometimes they are not included in current staff listings at all; indeed, it is instructive to see how newspaper structure has changed by studying the listings in Editor & Publisher Year Book. In 1976, in the middle of the decade introducing much of the change, out of 1,325 daily newspapers listed, only 48 included features editors, and lifestyle sections were represented in just nine papers (three as “lifestyle” and five as “life/style”). In contrast, during the same year, there were 706 society editors listed and 758 women’s editors. These figures suggest that change and experimentation with the old structures were just beginning, as the names of new editor categories also illustrate: Scene, View, Today, People, Accent, and of course Style, a section at The Washington Post that has been credited with leading the lifestyle revolution in newspapers.

Origins

With the exception of some lifestyle, technology, and expanded entertainment sections, the basic structure of the metropolitan daily newspaper has been in place for more than a century. Typically, urban papers have had separate areas or sections for news, sports, opinion, and business. Feature material has frequently been sprinkled throughout these various sections and has only recently come to dominate its own section by name. Some shifts have come fairly recently; for example, there is increased attention to entertainment and lifestyle material and a corresponding decrease of social and local celebrity news. As is clear from reading the staff listings, each of these newspaper units typically has its own hierarchy of staff writers and editors involved in creating and presenting material for the different audiences who read the paper. Each section is supported by advertising that is related to the general section topic—and indeed, some historians have argued that it is the advertising that has driven and controlled the creation of these different sections. They suggested women as an audience became of interest to editors when more advertisers wanted to reach those women with money to spend, an argument bolstered by advertisers’ general acceptance that women are the buyers in most families.

Society news offered an early addition to the broader newspaper editorial mix and was important to the development of popular mass-appeal dailies, a necessary step on the way to what is today called lifestyle coverage. These popular newspapers began publishing daily in the 1830s with a fuller range of stories on sports, criminal trial stories, and society news items. Social coverage had its first on the scene reporter when James Gordon Bennett of The New York Herald sent William H. Attree to a costume ball given by Mr. and Mrs. Henry Brevoort in 1840. Another early society writer was William Bininger, again for The New York Herald. A new interest in women readers helped open the door to women writers who were best able to write about their own lives. More than one chronicler of a newspaper’s history has remarked that women were believed to be more socially adept at fitting into higher social circles. There was also a shift toward elaborate descriptions of what society matrons wore to events, and again, women were believed to be more able to provide these verbal illustrations.

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Joseph Pulitzer is credited with creating the first women’s page, but in 1886, it began as a special column devoted to women’s interests. An issue of The World (May 25, 1884, page 11) shows this precursor of the woman’s page: the “World of Women” column. By the 1890s, women’s pages were a definite feature of larger papers, publishing information about clubs, society, and other topics of interest to women. And in 1895, a phenomenon of women’s editions of newspapers brought something new into the mix. Around the country, community women began taking over their local newspapers for a day. The power of the popular press and the importance of women’s work in the community were being paired to showcase women’s talents and abilities. It was the first time many women saw their names in print, and it was the beginning of a love affair with the newspaper world for many. One of the women to get a break in one of these editions was Elizabeth Meriwether Gilmer, who was to become America’s highest-paid female journalist (as Dorothy Dix) by the time of her death in 1951.

By 1900, women’s pages or sections with “women’s” topics were part of most large metropolitan dailies, and smaller newspapers throughout the country were quick to join. For more than a half century, the common elements of these pages were related to fashion, food, household hints, society, and advice. But not everyone was happy with the change. Women journalists wanted to write serious articles, and women readers frequently discussed the women’s pages as banal. One bit of evidence is that writers for the women’s editions in 1895 were penning sardonic, patronizing columns “for our female readers.” And as early as 1901, women and intellectuals were complaining that the women’s pages were a “hopeless case,” filled with useless trivia and social news, notes the historian Marion Marzolf. These pages may have been hopeless, but they were moneymakers: advertisements located on them commanded high prices.

Despite complaints about the drivel contained in women’s pages, they were an institution throughout the 20th century in most daily newspapers. The insistence of Eleanor Roosevelt to work only with women reporters was a boon to both women editors and women with aspirations for front-page reporting. Articles about serious social topics began to appear in the 1940s, as did items written by professional women. Some of these changes were bolstered by the increased professional activities of women during World War II, though the 1950s were to see a return to stories on beauty, cooking, society, and fashion. A decade later, women’s pages became the center of newspaper and social change. Because the women’s rights movement began to make news and because women began demanding rights for equal pay, childcare, and so on, women’s pages began to run more controversial stories and interviews. While some women’s editors were pleased by the increase in real news, some seemed to ignore these cultural happenings. Newspapers had hired increasing numbers of women, but many of them had been placed on the women’s pages. They, too, were eager to change the nature of women’s news. At the same time, a few courageous women’s page editors began what might be called campaigns to change their pages from predictable sections into columns of issues-centered reporting about equal rights, childcare, and spousal abuse. Conflict arose when advocates for women such as Gloria Steinem fought to keep news about the women’s movement from being buried in the women’s pages.

Unisex lifestyle coverage

The late 1960s and early ’70s saw the impetus for most of the dramatic changes. As Kay Mills put it in her A Place in the News (1988), “The evolution of the women’s pages marked a belated recognition that all parts of a newspaper should be prepared for all people,” adding that the changes were occurring partly because of social pressures and partly because of economics. At The Washington Post—one of the early claimants to journalistic lifestyle development—the Style section, Ben Bradlee’s major structural change, was introduced on January 6, 1969. The change came as longtime women’s editor Marie Sauer was retiring. Instead of replacing her and continuing the women’s section, Bradlee was seeking to ride the wave of social change.

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Bradlee’s idea was to create a section that gave cultural news and reviews a place of their own. It was to include food, fashion, fun, and culture—all directed to a unisex audience interested in an upscale lifestyle. His criticisms of women’s pages mirrored those of the women in the women’s movement who were trying to fight for newspaper changes. He spoke for many when he said that traditional women’s news was boring and that most newspaper editors had been listening to highly intelligent women who were vocal in their criticism of women’s pages with what seemed like endless information about diets, teas, and society gatherings. But the Style section itself was experiencing growing pains, and even when Thomas Kendrick, who became editor two years later, was able to bring order to journalistic chaos by setting editorial standards, there were problems. A memo from Bradlee underscored some of the change. Admonishing his reporters to avoid words like pert, dimpled, cute, or vivacious, he wrote that stories about the achievements of women should be written “without a trace of condescension.” But the problems were still not solved. One of them resulted from a letter to publisher Katharine Graham signed by 59 women at the paper who were unhappy with what they described as discrimination at the paper. This act was quickly followed by a lawsuit in 1972 filed by the same women. In her 1998 autobiography, Graham wrote, “Since the new ‘Style’ section had replaced the old women’s pages, women had lost four jobs.” Besides Graham, Meg Greenfield was the only woman in upper management at the paper.

A few editors had applauded and supported the women’s-news momentum, but they were in the minority. Although there was talk and plenty of activity at a handful of papers, rarely are the stories of women’s page editors presented as part of the history of newspapers. For example, although Marjorie Paxson won the highest honor at the Penney-Missouri awards for a women’s page editor while at the St. Petersburg Times, neither her name nor an entry for women’s pages appears in a significant biography of Nelson Poynter and the St. Petersburg Times. Likewise, the story of Maggie Savoy, a leading women’s page editor in the 1960s, is absent from a history of the Arizona Republic.

Women’s editors oppose changes

One of the first to pioneer change in women’s news within the existing structure was Dorothy Jurney, an editor who had been encouraged to expand the coverage of women’s activities at the Miami Herald. Like Colleen Dishon of the Chicago Tribune, she was an advocate for retaining women’s sections and making them relevant to women’s lives. Jurney, who was hired at the Detroit Free Press to change the women’s pages and direct a “family section,” has addressed what happened during the change in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Applying what happened at the Post to newspapers throughout the country, Jurney then explained that what really happened throughout the country was that the women’s editors lost their jobs to men who knew nothing about women’s basic interest in social issues. Women’s advocacy and news for the women’s pages just disappeared.

Jurney was not alone in being unhappy with a looming, much-discussed shift to lifestyle reporting from women’s sections. Writing in Editor & Publisher in 1973, June Almquist, women’s editor of the Seattle Times, wrote that some women’s sections of the country jumped out of the window too quickly: “In their eagerness for change, they lost their identity—becoming, at best, general-feature sections and, in some cases, hodgepodge sections.” One trap, she noted, is that women’s sections had become dumping grounds for other areas of the newspaper—bridge columns, coin-collection columns, travel stories, and so on. On the opposite side of the coin were women’s sections that “went overboard” on social issues such as rape, poverty, and venereal disease. But as Alquist noted, “the biggest fattest ads in the newspaper are the grocery ads, the fashion ads, the home furnishings ads. And we know full well why those advertisers want to be in the women’s sections: because the major buyers of consumer goods are women.”

Earlier that same year, the Penney-Missouri workshop sessions at the University of Missouri tackled the problems facing women’s editors at this time of change by honoring Judith Anderson of the San Francisco Chronicle’s “People” section with the first Paul L. Myhre Award for Excellence in Reporting. These influential Penney awards were instrumental in changing the face of women’s news and inadvertently promoting the lifestyle impetus.

Lifestyle can today be defined as a universally accepted descriptive with the categories of gendered, feature, cultural, and even entertainment writing. By the turn of the 21st century, it had become less commonly used as an identifying label for editors throughout the newspaper industry (only 152 lifestyle editors of 1,325 daily newspapers in 2006), and it must be understood as a description of feature material that is usually gender-neutral—that is, family instead of women’s articles. There were also indications that, at some papers, women and society editors were still firmly entrenched in the early 2000s. In fact, a return to women’s news at the Chicago Tribune was widely imitated.

The original version of this article was published by SAGE Publications in The SAGE Encyclopedia of Journalism.