Staying Cool: The Impact of Air Conditioning on News Work and the Modern Newsroom

ABSTRACT

Along with the telephone and the car, the typewriter and other more “mundane” or otherwise unheralded background media technologies, air conditioning (AC) helped to develop modern American newspaper buildings and their newsrooms into the institutions they are today. AC was an invisible tool that was nonetheless felt—literally—when it was there and noted when it was not, as the century wore on and journalism developed into a more white-collar occupation. This article explores AC as a “blacked-boxed” technology using spatial theory, actor-network theory and a material sensibility to make manifest, in specific ways, the physical world of the air-conditioned newsroom.

KEYWORDS:

• Newsrooms
• technology
• materiality
• actor network theory
• space
• place
• journalism

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 It should be noted at the beginning of this study that is not a history of air conditioning, but rather of a AC in newsrooms.

2 Some histories of individual newsrooms or the memoirs of prominent news workers mention AC in passing, but only in footnotes, and even then, very rarely. While a few did, it was also not uncommon for guides that discussed launching a new newspaper, at mid-century, to not include AC as a specific infrastructure consideration, per se.

3 About 250 examples were located, and of these, the most relevant of these were narrowed down further, to 21.

4 While this is a useful resource, the optical character recognition (OR)remains not particularly great (with this having been taken from microfilm), so it is likely there are more references to be found and the above is likely a bit of an undercount, if anything.

5 Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Dept. of Labor, “CPI Inflation Calculator.” http://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm.