Awards
- Winner of Best Book in Canadian Business History 2019 (United States)
Overview
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.
Full Product Details
Author: Michael Stamm (Michigan State University)
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Imprint: Johns Hopkins University Press
Dimensions:
Width: 15.60cm
, Height: 2.90cm
, Length: 23.50cm
Weight: 0.635kg
ISBN: 9781421426051
ISBN 10: 1421426056
Pages: 376
Publication Date: 11 December 2018
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
Professional & Vocational
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: Out of stock
The supplier is temporarily out of stock of this item. It will be ordered for you on backorder and shipped when it becomes available.
Reviews
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. -- Charlotte Gray * Literary Review of Canada * 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. * Financial Post *
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. -- Charlotte Gray * Literary Review of Canada *
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. -- Charlotte Gray * Literary Review of Canada * 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. * Financial Post * 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. -- David Welky, University of Central Arkansas * Journal of American History *
Author Information
Michael Stamm is an associate professor of history at Michigan State University. He is the author of Sound Business: Newspapers, Radio, and the Politics of New Media.
