Newsrooms and the Enduring Use of Paper: Not Just Nostalgia

This study explores how physical paper has survived into the twenty-first century in supposedly paperless digital news organizations. As Michael Stamm has shown, paper and news work have a long and complex history. But newspapers and their newsrooms were supposed to lead the way out of the world of paper with its elimination in new computerized workspaces well before the end of the twentieth century, as work by Nik Usher, Florence Le Cam, and Juliette De Mayer has also discussed. And yet paper survived (and thrived!) in the 1990s and beyond in these spaces, in the form of stylebooks, notepads, boxes, reference guides, printed e-mails, calendars, sticky notes, memos, bulletin boards, and other miscellaneous forms. The media history of this survival matters because it shows how technological transitions within information industries are long, complex and rarely ever “complete”—the resiliency of paper is indicative of other kinds of transitions, those supposedly finished and those still in process. Paper has endured for both affective and practical reasons, which this study explores.