Dead Tree Media: Manufacturing the Newspaper in Twentieth-Century North America by Michael Stamm (review)

"Dead tree media" is journalism slang for print newspapers in the digital age. Michael Stamm's intriguing study of twentieth-century newspaper manufacturing centres on the once ubiquitous printed newspaper to discuss broad developments in the histories of papermaking, business, international political economy, and media. He presents a compelling story of the overlapping processes of an industrial age information technology that transformed the tangible world of forests and the imagined possibilities of layout and design into a product so mundane that his close attention to the disposable newspaper jolts the reader's attention to something easily overlooked. While his focus is on the Chicago Tribune Company, his research takes us on an unexpectedly wide-ranging journey.

Stamm's book contributes to several fields of history. He takes seriously the value of material history by examining the object of the printed newspaper. Sometimes journalism is called "the first draft of history" because historians have used the content of newspapers as important primary sources. But Stamm goes deeper to tell us about paper production and the newsprint itself, taking us into the developments of papermaking and the industrial shift from rag paper to the industrial use of wood fibres. Moving from the United States to Canada, he shows us how the demand for wood fibre changed forestry practices and triggered hydroelectric generation projects that powered paper mills. New paper formulations led to new printing technologies and folding formats (tabloids, photographs, ink types) which transformed the experience of reading newspapers. Newspapers played a central role in twentieth-century popular print culture, and with widespread public education and the cheapness of the daily paper, this humble object became ubiquitous.

Stamm's work builds on the historical literature of industrial resource towns, especially those in central Canada, by situating them in a transnational continental perspective. His accounts of free trade debates, both in the early and latter decades of the twentieth century, bookends the rise and fall of a political economy where Canadian politicians courted American capital to exploit the potential resources of an "undeveloped" landscape. Paying close attention to business and political decisions on both sides of the border, the reader is shown the nuts and bolts of resource development that went on under the frothy political rhetoric generated in Ontario, Quebec, Illinois, New York, and the respective national capitals. While Stamm's narrative sometimes seems encumbered by the detailed workings of businesses and legislatures, it pays off by yielding a high-resolution picture of how and why the industrial production of newspapers spanned the Canadian-American border, and connected millions of people engaged in diverse activities.

While the local newspapers might have carried news from other places, not many of the readers would have considered the actual paper itself to be as international as the news it carried. Going beyond the image of transit riders reading tabloid papers on their daily commutes, Stamm reminds us of the extensive supply chains required to mass produce an inexpensive product. By connecting Baie Comeau with Chicago, Thorold, and Brooklyn, he maps a network of vertically integrated production and distribution strategies that jumped borders to integrate regions. People within these regions could have hardly imagined their interconnectedness through the home delivery or the news-stand purchase of the daily paper.

Stamm's study might provoke a reader to frame the production of industrial newspapers in environmental terms. Huge demand for daily papers in the United States changed the ecologies of some central Canadian landscapes; Stamm gives us a perspective on how some of the forests of central Canada ended up in New York and Chicago as rolls of newsprint. The hydroelectric dams that powered the Canadian paper mills altered the seasonal cycles, courses, and habitats of the rivers they harnessed. Industrial newspapers left an indelible imprint on the landscapes and the people involved in their production, and the decline of print newspaper manufacturing left behind gutted resource towns built for...