Society News Helped Define a Sense of Place

Society Department in the 1939s. From left, Helen DuBois Johnson, Amalia Stevens Burns,
Alice Lesesne Beville and Ann Battle. Note the one telephone for the office and the very clean desk tops.
Of course, there were no personal computers in the 1930s.

After the Press and Register combined in 1932, Frances Durham became The Mobile Press Register’s first society editor.

The Society Department reported a good deal of high society news such as the coming out of debutantes and the activities of Mardi Gras societies. But the department also made room for feature stories of general interest. At some point it became the Women’s Department and eventually Living Today with its staff writing many of the feature stories in the newspaper.

This remained the case until 1992, when news in the section was “democratized” to carry more stories about society doings in general and far less about high-society elites. An advertiser and reader backlash resulted in the paper starting a Thursday section called High Profile, which was run by a society editor and carried more of the old society news type of stories.

In 2009, the Press Register began publishing the weekly lifestyle magazine ‘Zalea, which covered much of the Mardi Gras and other high-society news.

As elitist as content might have during most of the department’s existence, it did give readers a sense of place and uniqueness about Mobile. Modern editors tended to bring the Press Register up to big-city journalism standards and drive out everything that made it unique.

Until the 1990s, the Living Today department occupied a cramped, L-shaped space on the second floor of the Press Register building on Government Street. Photo courtesy of Carol Cain Warren.