A 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 Association
Popular 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
the forest to the newsstand, he provides an account of the obscure and
often hidden labor involved in this manufacturing process by showing how
it was driven by not only publishers and journalists but also
lumberjacks, paper mill workers, policymakers, chemists, and urban and
regional planners.
Stamm describes the 1911 shift in tariff policy that gave US publishers
duty-free access to Canadian newsprint, providing a tremendous boost to
Canadian paper manufacturers and a significant subsidy to American
newspaper publishers. He also explains how Canada attracted massive
American foreign investment in paper mills around the same time that US
publishers were able to gain greater access to Canada's vast spruce
forests. Focusing particularly on the Chicago Tribune, Stamm provides a
new history of the rise and fall of both the mass circulation printed
newspaper and the particular kind of corporation in the newspaper
business that had shaped many aspects of the cultural, political, and
even physical landscape of North America. For those seeking to
understand the travails of the contemporary newspaper business, Dead
Tree Media is essential reading.
