Society reporting

In journalism, society reporting or society journalism is the reporting of society news in a newspaper or magazine. In the newsroom it is the province of the society desk.

The first true society page in the United States was the invention of newspaper owner James Gordon Bennett Jr., who created it for the New York Herald in 1835. His reportage centred upon the lives and social gatherings of the rich and famous, with names partially out by dashes and reports mildly satirical. Mott et al. record that "Society was at first aghast, then amused, then complacent, and finally hungry for the penny-press stories of its own doings." Bennett had in fact been reporting such news since 1827, with articles in the New York Enquirer. 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. By 1885, Ward McAllister had been recruited to report on society news for the New York World by Joseph Pulitzer, and it was around that time that society reporting, both on dedicated society pages and in the (then) new Sunday supplements, became very popular.

Society pages and society reporting was prevalent in the New York daily newspapers from the winter of 1880 onward. The previous year, Pearl Rivers had transplanted the notion to New Orleans, where she had begun the Society Bee, a local society column, on March 16, 1879. Again, the initial reaction was shock. Rivers reported, in the Society Bee itself of course, the reaction of one woman who was "opposed to print on principle. Print applied to persons is her special horror and abomination … poison only fit for politics, Associated Press dispatches, and police reports. She thought me very wrong to mention any ladies' names in a newspaper. She said [that] it was 'shabby' and 'shoddy' and 'shameful'.". But Rivers persevered, and a decade later, on November 2, 1890, the column, now entitled simply Society, was the largest part of the Sunday paper carrying it.

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