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ABSTRACT
Along with other cultural organizations, newspapers, through waves of digital disruption, have become subject to a dominant narrative of crisis. But newspapers have long participated in change. A constructivist approach, qualified by consideration of media materiality, draws attention to diverse but essential processes of innovation around them. We see a contraflow of migration from digital to print, opening up a shared media space; bonding strategies are bringing multimedia to ink on paper, while bridging via boundary objects such as QR (Quick Response) codes are connecting the two. Among other initiatives, development of automation of news production and experiments with transparency are further evidence of an active embrace of change by newspapers that calls into question the discourse on their demise. This analysis inductively develops a nuanced account of the role of the newspaper as an object and as an institution. It suggests a hybrid, multifaceted, enduring presence of print in the complex media ecology of the future.
Notes
1. Kevin Barnhurst contributed substantially to this article, up to a late stage of its completion, before his sudden passing.
2. With regard to the current decline-of-newspapers discourse, Brüggemann et al. (Citation2016) points out that it is based on a perspective centered on corporate and U.S. interests.
3. The proponents of the newspapers-in-decline narrative also overlook digital technologies for printing newspapers, which predate the development of online news. The newspapers adopted these digital technologies (Waller Citation2012). Later, newspapers were among the first information organizations to move online.
4. The current outbreak of concerns about entering a social media-driven “post-truth” era (e.g., Lewis Citation2016) was presaged in fake news by Jon Stewart and other comedians (Borden and Tew Citation2007).