In 1916,  Stephen G. Clow, who had moved to New York from Prince Edward Island near the turn of the century, began editing a gossip magazine, Broadway Brevities, devoted to the worlds of New York entertainment and society.   Broadway Brevities was vicious and relentless in its circulation of rumour.  In 1925, Clow was convicted, following a highly-publicized trial, of running Broadway Brevities as the basis of a blackmail racket.   He served two years in the Atlanta Penitentiary, then  launched a new version of  Broadway Brevities in 1930.  Clow soon lost control of the title, however, and in 1931 it was transformed into Brevities:  America's First Tabloid Weekly.   

The tabloid Brevities has become almost legendary, featured in the recent exhibition which opened New York’s Museum of Sex, and quoted regularly in on-line calendars devoted to gay history.  (It regularly covered the gay and lesbian demi-mondes of New York City.)  Much of this attention has focussed on the lurid headlines featured on the front and back covers of each issue. These headlines, like those of today’s supermarket tabloids, mimic those of the daily newspaper, but their references are general and their elaborate inventiveness obscures the low number of references to specific events or people.

In 1937, down on his luck, and after launching another short-lived newspaper, the Broadway Tattler, Stephen G. Clow moved to Toronto, where he helped publisher Morris Ruby start  a number of spicy humour magazines.  These included the Canadian Tattler and Canadian versions of U.S. titles like Zippy and Paree.   Among the magazines which Ruby published with Clow's help was a Canadian version of Broadway Brevities, full of material lifted from U.S. magazines and edited, at least for a few months, by Clow himself.   Clow returned to New York City after he and Ruby were arrested by Ontario police on charges of publishing obscene materials.  (These charges were eventually dropped.)  Clow died in New York City in 1941, penniless and alone.  The Canadian Brevities was published for at least another decade, calling itself, in its later years, "Canada's Oldest Humour Magazine."  By the 1940s, the magazine was devoted almost exclusively to risqué cartoons, jokes and stories.