Description
Book SynopsisA deep and timely account of how American newspapers were produced and distributed on paper. Winner of the Best Book in Canadian Business History by the Canadian Business History AssociationPopular assessments of printed newspapers have become so grim that some have taken to calling them dead tree media as a way of invoking the medium's imminent demise. There is a literal truth hidden in this dismissive expression: printed newspapers really are material goods made from trees. And, throughout the twentieth century, the overwhelming majority of trees cut down in the service of printing newspapers in the United States came from Canada. In Dead Tree Media, Michael Stamm reveals the international history of the commodity chains connecting Canadian trees and US readers. Drawing on newly available corporate documents and research in archives across North America, Stamm offers a sophisticated rethinking of the material history of the printed newspaper. Tracing its industrial production from
Trade ReviewA fascinating narrative about newsprint that encompasses the history of journalism, trade relations, and industrial capitalism in twentieth-century North America . . . [Stamm's] research is impressive and the portrayal of McCormick's empire enthralling.
—Charlotte Gray,
Literary Review of CanadaDead Tree Media: Manufacturing the Newspaper in Twentieth-Century North America, the inaugural winner of the Canadian Business History Association's Best Book in Canadian Business History, demonstrates that the industry built to deliver the product of dead trees hot off the presses onto citizens' doorsteps — just to keep them informed of the daily news — at one time unleashed massive economic and industrial disruption of its own.
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Financial PostHistorians of the newspaper business fixate on press coverage of a certain event, or on how a publisher's ideology shaped a paper. The historian Michael Stamm upends traditional approaches to the newspaper business. Rather than focus on its public face, he explores its connections to global supply chains, international trade relations, regional economic development, and other issues that seem worlds apart from the blaring headlines.
—David Welky, University of Central Arkansas,
Journal of American HistoryTable of ContentsAcknowledgments
Note to the Reader
Introduction: What Was a Newspaper?
Part I. The North American Newspaper
Chapter 1. The Making of Industrial Print Culture
Chapter 2. Forests, Trade, and Empire
Chapter 3. The Continental Newsprint Market and the Perils of Dependency
Part II. Extending Chicagoland
Chapter 4. The Local Newspaper as International Corporation
Chapter 5. Robert McCormick and the Politics of Planning
Chapter 6. Work and Culture along the Newsprint Supply Chain
Part III. The Newspaper beyond the Printed Page
Chapter 7. The Diversified Newspaper Corporation
Chapter 8. The Industrial Newspaper and Its Legacies
Chapter 9. The Problem of Paper in the Age of Electronic Media
Conclusion. Media Infrastructures, Old and New
Notes
Index
