Newsprint Metropolis

As daily papers close their doors amid the media revolutions of the early twenty-first century, their continued existence apparently threatened, it has become easier to historicize the newspaper as a media form. Rather than simply relying on newspapers as sources, scholars are asking new questions about the history, and historical significance, of the newspapers themselves. In her wonderful new book, Julia Guarneri returns us to the salad days of the mass daily at the turn of the twentieth century, when new printing technologies and new urban markets produced an efflorescence of newspapers. Guarneri's intervention is simple but compelling. The history of the newspaper and the history of the city are intertwined; neither can be understood without the other. This argument is explored in four thematic chapters, each focused on a different city. In chapters on Philadelphia, New York, and Chicago, we see newspapers operating as urban advice manuals, as muckraking city reformers, and, in their real estate and classified sections, as promoters of urban and suburban growth. In a standout concluding chapter, we witness the end of this era of locally oriented papers, as Milwaukee's distinctive newspaper ecology was transformed by nationalizing trends of consolidation and syndication in the 1920s

Newsprint · Pulp and paper industry · Autobiographical and Biographical Writing · Engineering · History · Literature, Film, and Journalism Analysis · Photography and Visual Culture