Amateur Journalism

Amateur journalism is a hobby of writing, publishing, and printing small journals or papers purely for pleasure rather than as a livelihood, distinct from citizen journalism in that its practitioners are not necessarily reporting news and often write essays, fiction, or poetry instead. The hobby took organized form in the United States after the Civil War once affordable printing presses became available, and its literary high point came between 1915 and 1925, with figures such as H. P. Lovecraft and W. Paul Cook prominent within it; a further wave in the 1930s combined fine printing with crude hand press and mimeograph work. Amateur press associations at the national, regional, and local level organize the circulation and exchange of members publications and hold conventions, though the hobbys participation has fallen to a much smaller, often elderly membership in the United States and Canada, with some associations moving online and blogging displacing part of what the hobby once did. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/