Society reporting

Other features that frequently appear on the society page are a calendar of charity events and pictures of locally, nationally and internationally famous people.

The first true society page in the United States was the invention of newspaper owner James Gordon Bennett Sr., who created it for the New York Herald in 1840.

[1] His reportage centred upon the lives and social gatherings of the rich and famous, with names partially deleted by dashes and reports mildly satirical.

In the period after the United States Civil War, there were many newly rich people in the country, and reportage of their antics, sometimes tasteless and gauche, was of considerable entertainment value.

Print applied to persons is her special horror and abomination ... poison only fit for politics, Associated Press dispatches, and police reports.

But Rivers persevered, and a decade later, on November 2, 1890, the column, now simply titled Society, was the largest part of the Sunday paper carrying it.

[8] In Britain, society news was at the same time emerging in the British press as part of "women's journalism", again aimed at attracting a female readership.

For example, the Ottawa Journal didn't permit Florence Randal, its first society reporter, to do anything but recite simple chronicles of the dowagers and debutantes of the city.

Mrs. Willoughby Cummings (née Emily Ann McCausland Shortt), worked as a press journalist and the first society editor of the Toronto Globe under the pen name of "Sama".

[12] Dix Harwood claimed that the society desk, and the woman who ran it, was nonetheless important:[7] Too often this department has [a] little dignity, but it may be made into a highly respectable source for covering local happenings; and the society desk is oftentimes one of the most valuable offices on the paper if the occupant [should] be a woman of high intelligence with a nose for news ... and a woman of poise and dignity—a women [sic] whom hostesses will be forced to treat as equal.Typical topics were "Miss Emily Bissell as a Turkish Girl", Chicago Tribune, Jan 1, 1900 or "Maryland Society Belle Was Fair Senorita at Ball", Times-Picayune, Feb 7, 1916.

I shamelessly clipped most of my material from other newspapers, and stuck to the job for about fourteen months until young Joe Atkinson, who was at that time a proof reader, noticed that all my stuff had previously been published in some other paper.In 1936, journalist Ishbel Ross declared that "No society writer is more widely known on both sides of the Atlantic than May Birkhead."