The Press: Flight from Fluff

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Omission. While the Times usually sticks to one page for special features, Long Island's Newsday and the Washington Post have moved toward full feature sections covering the arts, the media, lifestyles, personalities of both sexes—all under one umbrella. These papers run paragons of what women's sections can become. Newsday's "Part II," with an assist from its tabloid format, reads much like a newsmagazine. Stories dealing with medicine, behavior, entertainment are separated into subsections. Not one is devoted exclusively to women, and the omission is not an oversight. Explains Newsday Executive Editor David Laventhol: "I feel that women's pages should be a thing of the past. They were frivolous, nonsubstantial and insulting to women."

Though big papers on both coasts and in the Midwest have been moving at varying speeds toward innovation, the flight from the frivolous or the merely dull has hardly begun on other papers. Press critics argue that many papers still regard women's coverage primarily as a lure for food and fashion advertising. As Charlotte Curtis points out: "Most pages developed because they were good for advertisers, not for readers."

Simple inertia is another problem, and not only on small papers in the hinterland. The New York Daily News, with the largest seven-day circulation in the country, still offers generally unimaginative fare, as does the New York Post. The Philadelphia Bulletin has not exactly lost its breath chasing changing times either. Marjorie Paxson, the Bulletin's women's editor, defends her paper's approach: "I think people here are very interested in society. Not all of the city is ghettos by any means. It is up to me to strike a balance." When the paper is serving a heavy diet of what she calls "problem stories" on drug abuse and prostitution, says Paxson, she likes to offset that by sending a reporter to cover an event like the midwinter ball in St. Petersburg, Fla. Paxson speaks for many editors, male and female. Ranking men executives, in fact, are often the strongest advocates of leaving women's pages in their old mode. Frequently changes occur only after restless women subordinates agitate for it.

Reader resistance is also a factor.

A few years ago the Arizona Republic gave its women's staff a free hand to change content, and the page began doing more serious articles. Among them were series on migrant farm workers and rest homes for the aged, and a moving story on efforts to help a catatonic child. According to Jeanne Tro Williams, who became women's editor last July, the experiment aroused too much opposition. Though the Republic still competently covers Indian life and culture, "We have started to come back from deep-think," says Williams now. "As a relief from hard news we are trying to return to a more circusy atmosphere. We want to do happy stories about women who have done something special." The Republic also features 75 brides a week—with their bridegrooms.