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A 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.
Dead 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.
Historians 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.
Looking through the lens of the US newspaper as an industrial operation, this excellent book ranges up and down the supply chain connecting the woods operations, milling, shipping, editorial, printing, and distribution. The result is nothing less than a history of the material foundation of twentieth-century news. With this fresh perspective on both the news and the paper it was printed on, Stamm has composed the most imaginative history of the newsprint industry in more than a generation.
Tying media history with the history of industrial capitalism through the example of the Chicago Tribune company and its vertical integration across the US-Canadian border, Dead Tree Media makes a raft of very significant contributions to North American history and the history of journalism. An original and refreshing approach to the history of media, this pithy book pushes me to think anew about how I will teach and write about North American journalism and business history. Stamm deserves great credit for putting together such a thoroughly researched, innovative, and fascinating piece of work.
Dead Tree Media is a penetrating study of one facet of United States–Canada relations in the twentieth century as engineered by Robert R. McCormick to supply the Chicago Tribune and the New York Daily News with mountains of newsprint. A study of the all-too-familiar tale of the cutting of North American forests, it is also a story of corporate paternalism, right wing rhetoric, supping with the devil without the long spoon, yes-men, political ambitions, the making of a company town, and decades of ecological destruction of Québec spruce forest. It shows an American takeover of Canadian rivers in a region of low population regarded as anything-goes wilderness and the birth pangs of today’s giant Hydro-Québec. Canadian and American historians will be greatly interested in these pages.
Historians have written telling international histories of single commodities: salt, corn, cotton. In this splendid book, Michael Stamm tells the story of newsprint. In doing so, he deftly reinterprets not only the history of American newspapers but also the histories of tariffs and trade, natural resource exploitation, and US-Canadian relations.
This engrossing book has much to offer media scholars, economic historians and followers of the new materialisms in cultural analysis. Offering itself as a ‘natural history of the newspaper,’ Dead Tree Media shifts the study of news media from debates over journalism’s purpose to the history of trees, fibres, rivers, fire, and ice. Stamm deploys a dazzling array of sources to show how one firm, the Chicago-based Tribune Company, shaped the economic and political destiny of an entire country.
In this path-breaking work, Michael Stamm brilliantly combines the traditions of political economy and cultural history with meticulous archival research. He evocatively demonstrates how the industrial newspaper emerged and developed on a vertically integrated continental basis, with particular reference to the extensive cross-border operations of the Chicago Tribune Company.
About
Book Details
Publication Date
Status
Available
Trim Size
6.125
x 9.25
Pages
376
ISBN
9781421426051
Illustration Description
23 halftones
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
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
Chapt
Acknowledgments
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
