Subscribing to publicity: Syndicated newspaper features for moviegoing in North America, 1911–15

Abstract

This article charts how movies were integrated into the existing popular print culture of weekend newspapers in North America between 1911 and 1915. Neither the movie theatre nor the newspaper should be given priority as the primary site of cinema culture. The practice of reading a newspaper’s film page would be incomplete without a trip to join the mass audience at a movie theatre; conversely, a moviegoer’s pleasure could be whetted by the print supplement. Early, isolated experiments in metropolitan newspapers led to syndicates offering film pages for reproduction in small town papers. With the proliferation of moving picture publicity in newspapers throughout 1913, film studios began to collaborate with newspaper syndicates on a continental scale. Movie stories appeared in daily and weekly forms in various newspapers chains, well beyond the familiar ‘serial queen’ fiction tie-in. A subscription to the newspaper could become a commitment to engage with the mass market for movies. Insofar as a public is constituted through publicity, audiences are conjoined to readerships through the periodic call to participate in mass leisure with other readers.