Newsprint Metropolis: City Papers and the Making of Modern Americans By Julia Guarneri

Abstract

Julia Guarneri qualitatively analyzes United States newspapers from 1880 to 1930, the era in which the modern newspaper developed. She studies not only the “hard news” at the front of the paper, but also the content of the rest of the paper—the features, the “women’s pages,” the sports, the comics, and even the real estate listings and the retail and classified ads. According to Guarneri, “newspapers allowed readers to grasp and join a newsprint metropolis when the physical city had grown too large to fully explore or comprehend” (p. 8). Her concept of a “newsprint metropolis” has much in common with what Benedict Anderson and others have described as imagined communities.