Weekly Reader – RIP (1928 – 2012)

Do you remember the Weekly Reader?  Depending on your age, and I’m not asking, starting in 1928 your teacher may have handed you the Weekly Reader in newspaper or magazine format.  Alas, the Weekly Reader is no more.  Scholastic is folding the Reader into their own weekly publication.

I spent my summers swimming, fishing and sometimes riding my girlfriend’s pony down the lanes and through the fields of Lake Bruce, Indiana.  I was lucky, my parents bought me the summer edition of Weekly Reader.

Every Friday, I stayed close to my grandmother’s cottage waiting for the mailman to deposit my precious magazine in the rural route mailbox under our neighbor’s pear tree across the tar and gravel street. Since the statute of limitations has expired (by decades) on my misdeed, I will admit that I often celebrated the Reader‘s arrival with a pear pilfered from that same tree.

I hid behind the shed or in my green canvas pup tent planted near the garden to read – heck, memorize – every word of the world outside our small town.

Thanks, Weekly Reader.  I’ll miss you.

Get yer tabloid news here!

Ah, tabloid, a word that implies sensational and probably shoddy journalism, complete with explicit pictures to back up  salacious stories. But when tabloid newspapers first reached New York in the 1920s, the term didn’t describe the newspaper’s content but rather its compact size – roughly 11” x 17” – easy to read on the bus, trolley or subway.

 

 

The earliest newspapers were printed on a single, wide sheet of paper. Many had text only on one side and were sometimes folded into fourths.  These were the original broadsheets, ancestors to the 11” x 23” format of the four newspapers delivered to my house every day.

Today serious newspapers, especially in England, are printed in the eco-friendly, smaller tabloid format.

Just goes to show, you can’t judge a paper by its size.

From Risque to Respectable

In the 1920s, New York hosted a reported dozen morning and evening newspapers from the “young” gray lady, The New York Times, to the weekly tabloid destined to become the National Enquirer. One of the most unlikely evolutions came to the “invasive and sensational” New York Herald.