Join the Media and Materiality Research Cluster for the first Montreal Media History Seminar of 2025. This talk will explore the history and significance of Junior Press Clubs in 20th-century newspapers, examining how youth-driven media outlets shaped early youth journalism and the varying motivations behind their creation, drawing insights from Gabriele and Moore’s book The Sunday Paper: A Media History (Illinois, 2022).
ABOUT THE EVENT:
Between 1890 and 1990, for the entire span of newspapers’ predominance of mass media, a small but significant number of papers ran “junior press clubs.” These outlets expanded the typical weekend children’s page into fully-fledged more or less self-organized youth organizations. Junior Press Clubs had elected officers trained in the production of a weekly or daily school or youth publication.
In their book chapter on tabloid and poster supplements of The Sunday Paper (which we offer as background reading) Gabriele and Moore briefly spotlighted early bannered children’s pages and specially-sized ‘junior” journals as a matter of “fashioning the supplement for little hands” (pp. 71-79). Their new, preliminary research into junior press clubs’ in later years demonstrates surprising variability and sporadic adoption; they did not become standardized or syndicated on a continental scale. Some were pitched as entertainment, offering club members picnics, free movies or trips to ball games. Some were relatively elaborate, like the Los Angeles “Junior Times” Club’s weekly magazine, entirely written, illustrated, edited and managed by a juvenile staff. The LA Times (1923) promised “sunshine dividends” for youth members, including their own pressroom and club quarters.
In this early exploration of these and other cases, Gabriele and Moore ask why a newspaper would undertake this extraordinary effort to facilitate entire “junior journals” (Minneapolis Journal 1898) that were “written by readers” (Hamilton Spectator, 1902)? They will share a range of examples, inviting Seminar participants’ further insights.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS:
Sandra Gabriele is the Vice-Provost, Innovation in Teaching & Learning and a Professor of Communication Studies at Concordia University. She has published on changing historical news forms. She is currently researching student fluency in the language of employability and mindful self-compassion in the professional development of university teaching.
Paul Moore is professor of sociology at Toronto Metropolitan University. His media histories of cinema exhibition in North America have focused on the relation between audiences and newspaper publicity, appearing in Film History, Canadian Journal of Film Studies, and The Moving Image. He is currently writing an updated history of cinema in Canada.
🗓: January 31, 2025
🕒: 3:00 – 4:30 PM
📍: Milieux Learning Atelier, EV 11.425, Concordia University