Rains, Stephanie
(2015)
Going for Competitions:
Active readers and magazine culture,
1900–1910.
Media History, 21 (2).
pp. 138-149.
ISSN 1368-8804
Abstract
This article assesses the extensive ‘reader competitions’ run in popular magazines and story papers
of the early twentieth century. Using examples from Irish story papers, it examines the appeal of
these competitions to both the publishers and the readers. For readers, competitions offered an
opportunity to display skills which combined the results of universal education with the more
playful knowledge that was part of popular parlour games and other leisure activities of the time.
They also offered readers an opportunity to ‘write back’ to the mass media, with indications of an
extremely high level of interactivity between readers and editors, including reader suggestions for
competition ideas, and disputes regarding the rules and judging of contests. The article goes on to
argue that these competitions were themselves significant examples of mass media structures of
the time, relying as they did on the specific forms of print culture and upon mechanisms of
industrial time and communication processes.
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