To embody and to embalm: The uses of collective memory in the final editions of failed newspapers

Introduction

While journalists have widely covered recent newspaper closings in the United States, little attention has been paid to what journalists actually write about in the final editions of failed newspapers. These final editions provide unique opportunities to study how journalists interpret and present the meaning of their work at moments of profound crises. The closings of major newspapers provide texts articulating how the community of journalists at each newspaper expressed their opinions of their own social and cultural roles.

How then do journalists at these closed newspapers cover the end of those newspapers, in those newspapers? What kind of metajournalistic discourse reflects on these moments? This article offers initial answers through an exploratory case study of four such instances: the Washington Star, which closed on 7 August 1981; the Philadelphia Bulletin, which closed on 29 January 1982; the Rocky Mountain News, which closed on 27 February 2009; and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which ceased publishing a daily newspaper on 17 March 2009. A number of factors motivated the selection of these four newspapers for this research.

Each newspaper served a populous metropolitan region in the United States, and each closed during broader periods of economic recession or crisis; a similar business climate existed for all four, a context which allows for reasonable comparison. Furthermore, the Star and the Bulletin closed less than 6 months apart, and the Post-Intelligencer and the Rocky Mountain News closed less than 3 weeks apart. Pairing the newspapers in this way also allowed for a comparison across eras to examine whether coverage and the meanings newspaper closings differed. Furthermore, the early pair reflects an early phase of an ongoing crisis of newspaper journalism, and the recent pair punctuates the current phase. Finally, a complete physical copy of each newspaper was available, which allowed for the ready analysis of both visual text and news copy. A review of the complete editions also allowed for a closer experience of the materiality of the newspapers – of what, interpolating Walter Benjamin (1936 [1969]), one Star columnist connected to their ‘aura’ (Kaplan, 1981).

This article aims precisely at that aura, or, more saliently, the construction thereof. Clearly, the end of a newspaper is a critical moment in its history. It is also what has been called a ‘critical incident’, which sparks a discussion upon which ‘collective memories pivot’ and which, for journalists, ‘suggest[s] a way of attending to moments that are important to the continued well-being of the journalistic community’ (Zelizer, 1992: 4). The closing of these four newspapers were critical incidents in precisely this way, significant to a wider readership but remarkably significant for the professional collective memory of journalism and for specific communities of journalists. And indeed, these final editions fall squarely in the camp of memory work. Specifically, they reveal self-reflexive journalistic discourse: these are not journalists writing about problems at other institutions, but rather journalists writing about themselves, and in doing so, they construct quite explicit memory texts.

Through a close reading of these four texts, this article seeks to build upon the conclusions drawn by numerous scholars that when memory work manifests as journalism, journalists construct social meaning, social memory, and a form of social historical truth – all through journalism itself. Thusly, journalists at these four newspapers interpreted their pasts through commemorative techniques in order to construct an understanding of the present meaning of the closings. In addition, because the well-being of the immediate journalistic communities had already been destroyed, discourse in these final editions could no longer shape those specific communities. Thus, the commemorations constructed in these editions also are an attempt to project a future memory of what each newspaper, as an entity, meant.

Analysis of these two uses of memory – using the past for present ends and projecting a future memory from a present text – reveals that journalists construct the idea of the newspaper as a crucible of meaning-making between journalists and readers, in ways that emphasize and privilege the role of journalists in that process. It also reinforces the idea that journalists as an interpretive community serve not only readers but also themselves, and shows that self-concern and self-regard persist at different points of the decline of the newspaper industry. Finally, this article argues that the deeper common crisis between all four papers was the destruction of that crucible – the destruction of the physical newspaper itself – and ultimately, the dematerialization of news.

Memories of journalism from the past, for the future

What the Star writer called his newspaper’s ‘aura’ is akin to the community resonance and mutual corroboration identified as crucial to the social truth of memory (Choi, 2008). In this view, accuracy may be considered less relevant than meaning. With memory work, ‘Issues of historical accuracy and authenticity are pushed aside to accommodate other issues, such as those surrounding the establishment of social identity, authority, solidarity, political affiliation’ (Zelizer, 1995: 217). Much of the literature on memory texts emphasizes the notion that memories change based on social contexts (Halbwachs, 1952 [1992]). Therefore, understanding those contexts and how, in them, memory is constructed is crucial to understanding the meaning of those memory texts.

When journalists turn to memory work, they layer further complexity into journalistic products; as Zelizer (1992) wrote, ‘the journalistic community activates its concern [about its professionalism] through its discourse about itself, and through the collective memories on which it is based’ (p. 9). At this turn, journalists function in three interrelated ways: reporting on ‘realities that are beyond the public’s immediate reach’, situating the past ‘within larger cultural and social contexts’, and telling ‘stories about their own work and the role they have played and still play in shaping social memories’ (Meyers, 2007: 721). The first of these functions is true of nearly all journalists’ work; the second appears when journalism takes an interpretive turn; the third appears when that interpretive turn becomes reflexive. Such reflexivity generates documents – at once historical and journalistic – that serve as touchstones for future memory (Kitch, 2011).

For the newspapers considered in this study, the event reported is quite clear: each newspaper closed. The meaning of those closings, though, is structured by journalists’ attempts to shape the social memory of their work, largely through revisiting their pasts. If representation constitutes the functional reality of events for those who do not witness the events (e.g. Lippmann, 1922; Hall, quoted in Stephens and Mindich, 2005: 373), then by re-presenting the newspapers’ pasts, journalists present the meaning of those pasts; in turn, those presentations become contemporaneous realities. Following James Carey’s (1989 [2009]) ritual view of communication, a newspaper-as-text orders reality and life. In these newspaper closings, the realities presented regard the social meaning of each newspaper and the social meaning of their closures – particularly for the journalists who presented those realities – thus ordering the end of the public life of a newspaper and its workers.

These realities – as much social truth as ontological – arise from the commemorative techniques journalists at these four newspapers employed to construct social memory of themselves. These texts deploy memory work in ways that can be divided into two general categories: retrospective memory and prospective memory. In this scheme, retrospective memory encompasses both the use of collective memories of the past to understand the present, and the attempts to craft collective memories of the present to be used in the future (Tenenboim-Weinblatt, 2011). Along these lines, memory work is often accomplished through anniversary journalism, which Hume (2010) defined as ‘current press remembrances and coverage of milestone historical events’ (p. 189); journalists frequently turn to anniversary journalism, as seen in studies of journalists revisiting New Orleans on the first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina (Robinson, 2009) and of Time-Life’s reconstructions of historical events (Kitch, 2006). Retrospective memory also encompasses commemorative journalism, a concept broader than but inclusive of anniversary journalism, which uses past events to understand present ones. But one such study concluded that while commemorative journalism ‘fails to provide the sort of historical context that many media critics argue is needed in news stories’, discussing and contesting past events in news stories ‘represent[s] a negotiation about the meaning of the past and how we will remember it as a community’ (Edy, 1999: 76). And ‘keepsake journalism’, defined as journalistic products deliberately designed to be saved as loci of present feelings and identity that we want to remember in the future (Kitch, 2011), is one way that journalists construct future collective memory of the meanings of both the past and the present.

Prospective memory is related to, although discrete from, this last notion. It regards establishing tasks for the future grounded in remembrance; it calls for remembering to take action. In many cases, though, the rituals of remembrance bleed across what is a somewhat porous border (Tenenboim-Weinblatt, 2011). Indeed, keepsake journalism produces media objects to be saved and used as keys to future remembrances. Such behavior spans both retrospective memory, for the object includes memories of past events constructed for present aims and present consumption, and prospective memory, for the object is to be saved and revisited in the future to remember the feelings at the moment of the original consumption.

The crux of prospective memory is remembering to accomplish that which has not yet been accomplished. In journalism, that takes the form of articulating how something that has not yet happened should happen. In the Washington Star, the Philadelphia Bulletin, the Rocky Mountain News, and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, prospective memory manifests as newspapers’ calls to remembrance and suggestions about how the final editions should be used in the future, and in the collective memories that the articles attempt to project onto or to establish in the minds of their readers. These final editions use the value of past journalistic work to authenticate these calls, suggestions, and projections. They try to represent what prospective memory should look like, should readers agree on the social meaning presented by the journalists.

Another reason these four newspapers span both retrospective and prospective memory functions is that they are of a unique class of memory texts that fully collapse the distance between the event being commemorated (each newspaper’s closing) and the vessel for the commemoration of that event (each newspaper’s final edition). A compression of the time between event and commemoration, and thus an acceleration of both interpretation and claims to interpretive authority, surely has occurred in recent years (e.g. Kitch, 2005; Robinson, 2009; Sturken, 2002; Zelizer, 2002). In the closings of these newspapers, the time between event and commemoration is nonexistent. Thus, the commemorative product is both the event being commemorated and the representation of the event. This self-commemoration is the final journalistic moment of these four newspapers, and thus, journalistic discourse becomes doubly reflexive. The stories told are about the newspapers and the value of their newswork, but also about the newspaper-as-institution, journalists-as-tribe, and the cultural esteem of newspapers. This is summary journalism about journalism itself.

The cultural value of newspapers is, to an extent, predicated on both the implicit and explicit authority afforded to journalists. The commemorative techniques used in these cases illustrate the idea that journalists lay claim to authority that overlaps both present and historical events (Zelizer, 1993). In the former case, journalists lay claim through eyewitness reporting. In the latter, they take advantage of their ability to go back and reinterpret past events – including their own histories and their own news coverage. By constructing memory texts that also serve as calls to future remembrance, the newspapers studied here attempt to assert authority over future interpretations as well. The commemorative techniques used by all four papers were remarkably similar, and they exemplify the idea that collective memory ‘represents a graphing of the past as it is used for present aims, a vision in bold relief of the past as it is woven into the present and into the future’ (Zelizer, 1995: 217).

Deploying retrospective memory: Page Ones, tall tales and triumphs

While the line between retrospective and prospective commemorative techniques is not always clear, all four newspapers used two techniques particularly aligned with retrospective memory: the reprinting of past front pages and hagiographic and mythologizing stories of past journalistic work.

Inside its A section, the Washington Star offered a full-page grid of nine front pages from the past, arranged in chronological order, under the headline ‘Epochal Events on The Star’s Changing Front Page’. This headline lends equivalent weight to the evolution of the design of the Star, and the events that Star presented, while emphasizing that knowledge of those events was provided by the Star. These events ranged from the assassination of US President Abraham Lincoln to the World War I armistice to the 1980 election that brought Ronald Reagan and other United States conservatives to power. Not only did the Star bring readers these events, nearly every event was a war, a disaster, or a resolution thereof – perhaps appropriate for a final edition of a newspaper, the closing of which is disastrous for its journalists.

The Bulletin published a special commemorative section about itself, and reproduced the first page of its first-ever edition, then called Cummings’ Evening Telegraphic Bulletin. The back page of the commemorative section reproduced nine more past front pages, running under the headline ‘Until death did us part: A chronicler of great events’. These front pages, printed slightly askew, included coverage of the end of World War I, the Hindenburg disaster, the 1929 stock market crash, and the moon landing, among others. Overlaid on all of these, with a thick black border, was the ninth: Page 1 of the final edition of the Bulletin. Funereal, this page not only reminded readers that the Bulletin brought them these ‘great events’ but also visually suggested that the most important of all was the last day of the Bulletin itself.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer and Rocky Mountain News used their past front pages to similar effect, but deviated in ways that likely reflect two different evolutions of newspaper journalism. First, as a sign of increasingly sophisticated story packaging, the front pages were integrated into other stories, rather than as stand-alone pages in the earlier papers. Second, the front pages depicted more parochial stories, suggesting that at the time of their closing, the Seattle and Denver newspapers particularly attended to the local nature of their newswork.

The Post-Intelligencer packaged a number of past front pages into a timeline organized by decade. Not every decade was awarded a front page; many were illustrated by news photography. But the reproduced front pages included one from 1876, as an example of the paper’s ‘early ancestor’, along with coverage of the Great Seattle Fire, the 1917 US declaration of war against Germany, the 1926 election of Seattle’s first female mayor, the 1940 collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, the 1944 invasion of Normandy, John F. Kennedy’s (JFK) assassination, and their ‘extra’ edition published following the terrorism of 11 September 2001. Folding these covers into a timeline that mixed events of global, national, and local historical significance with developments at the Post-Intelligencer suggests that the newspaper itself is the access point to remember such past events.

The Rocky Mountain News exhibited similar traits. That newspaper illustrated its main feature about its closing with eight covers that gave equivalent visual weight to stories such as the end of World War I, a 1947 killing of a Colorado woman, the 1954 announcement that the US Air Force Academy would be built in Colorado Springs, and the 1969 moon landing. A sidebar to the story ‘Rocky’s Long Run’ (Madigan, 2009), titled ‘The changing face of the Rocky’, presented five covers giving equivalent visual weight to subjects including its own change to a tabloid format and the 2005 Denver mayoral election.

In all four cases, the newspaper is positioned as the conduit of these ‘great events’ – most readers did not witness those events, and therefore cannot remember the events themselves. What readers can remember is that a newspaper told them about these events, and that is precisely what the deployment of past front pages asks readers to do. Furthermore, in all cases, news or history about each newspaper – be it the front cover of the first edition or the Rocky’s change to a tabloid format – is mixed with ‘great events’ in a way that lends them rhetorical equivalency. To remember great events, then, is to remember the newspaper. And to remember the newspaper is to remember its facility in interpreting the world.

Each newspaper also engages in deliberate hagiography and mythmaking about its role in the world and the work accomplished by its journalists. At the Washington Star, the story ‘It Takes All Kinds to Make a Newspaper – and the Star Had Them’ (1981) details the quirky nature and heroic work of its journalists. Following the assassination of US President JFK, a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agent left assassin Lee Harvey Oswald’s rifle in the trust of a Star reporter in Dallas. That reporter only later found out what it was and said ‘he’s still glad he stayed on the phone, dictating stories’. Another reporter, also a Coast Guard reservist, reported on the egregious spending by that entity to entertain Congressmen. When that reporter was next called for duty, he had to order 1500 copies of the Star to use to clean up ‘waste materials’ from pony rides. A note on contributors to this story describes the anecdotes as ‘assembled … from the reminiscences of Washington Star editorial staff members’. Three writers contributed to the piece; 41 editorial staffers are credited as lending memories to assemble this story about their collective identity. The anecdotes aim to tell readers what the staff was like, and what it was like to work at the Star – that is, why it was a special place and why it should be remembered.

Similarly, one Bulletin reporter lauded certain anecdotes – some perhaps apocryphal – as representing its reputation for journalistic tenacity, thoroughness, and ethics (Lee, 1982). A reporter found a way to call in his copy about the JFK assassination even though all the phone lines at the hospital were jammed. A photographer discovered a tricky way to conceal his camera when photographing South Philadelphia numbers runners and contributed to a Pulitzer-prize-winning story. The Philadelphia Athletics baseball team’s legendary manager, Connie Mack, visited the Bulletin to ask why it paid its reporters’ costs when they traveled to cover the team, when the As offered to subsidize those costs for newspapers. These stories, among others across a variety of beats, serve as journalistic hagiography, commemorating and elevating the actions of past journalists in order to authenticate the historical importance of the Bulletin and the quality of its journalism.

The Rocky Mountain News was even more expansive in its nearly linear history of editors, columnists, reporters, and photographers. This history republished old stories, laid claim to interpretive authority, and reinforced the image of the swaggering and effectual journalist. One editor who ‘helped save [the paper] from certain death’ (‘Jack Foster’, 2009) told readers in an item from 1942 why the paper entered the tabloid format, and in another discussed the grief over the assassination of US President JFK. Damon Runyon, before he went on to New York to write the pieces on which the musical ‘Guys and Dolls’ was based, wrote for the Rocky Mountain News; the final edition ran Runyon columns on state fairs and pumpkin pies. In another reprint, John Coit (‘John Coit’, 2009), who ‘charged into town in the early ‘80s, a flawed man trailing bad marriages and bad habits’ called readers to submit their Christmas memories in one of his last columns before his death at 38; those memories were re-remembered in this section.

Such hagiography closely ties to each paper’s claim to authority over its own history and memory. In a Post-Intelligencer piece titled ‘Agony, rapture, bribes and felons: Best stories were the people behind them’, the ‘people behind them’ were the journalists. For example,

Love Letter, 1981. Reporter Jack Smith was sent to the Kingdome to write a ‘color story on Kingdome prep football title games. One cheerleader somehow reminded Jack of the first woman he’d ever had a crush on, so he produced a missive, rampant with agony and rapture, about unrequited love – and we ran it! (Rudman, 2009)

Another, headlined ‘A cast of characters, with storied histories’, succinctly summarized these newspapers’ mythmaking aspect of memory work. ‘They swore and typed and quit and typed and rescinded and typed and risked their lives, jobs and relationships for the pleasure, pressure and paycheck earned from a daily newspaper’ (Lewis, 2009). A history of the Post-Intelligencer’s investigative reporting began with the following question and answer: ‘Who feared us? People in positions of power who abused that power’ (McCumber, 2009). The paper, then, is both the true power and, despite the potentially offensive characteristics of the tribe of journalists, the true enforcer of community values. These articles, in which journalists remember their own work or the work of journalists’ past, strive to craft a present understanding of each newspaper’s historical and social significance.

Deploying prospective memory: History, obituary, calls to remembrance

Prospective memory is normative: it calls for remembering to take action in the future. Because these final editions are doubly reflexive, the future action they call for is remembrance itself. While journalists in these final editions often exemplify both the journalistic and historical authorities to which they may lay claim, the closing of their newspapers serves to eradicate the interpretive authority of these journalistic micro-communities. In the future, the journalists cannot themselves remember to revisit this past issue. Thus, this future act is not to be executed by journalists, but by readers. Such a future act demands two things: an articulation of what, precisely, is to be remembered, and how it is to be remembered. Because this groundwork is necessary to future acts of remembrance, the final editions published institutional histories, turned to the obituary form to access commemorative language and functions, and issued sometimes-explicit calls to remembrance that underscore the prospective nature of their memory work.

The institutional histories published in the final editions aim not only at that day’s readers but also the future memories of those readers. Such histories provide something for the reader to remember, and in this way, serve as memory work. Because of the contentious nature of collective memory, the publication of such histories offers no guarantee that the newspaper and journalists will be remembered as they might wish. That the histories were published, though, strongly suggests the hope that the absence of the newspaper will be remembered in certain ways common to the newspapers in this study.

The memory function of institutional histories is akin to the use of past newspaper covers: to blend the newspapers’ histories and values with issues of national or global significance. The Star’s institutional history was clearly directed at memory: ‘It is a story of what this paper was like – of days, events and circumstances now largely forgotten – that should not be’ (Beveridge and Forbes, 1981). This article tied the growth of the Star to the growth of the city of Washington, but never to the exclusion of traditional news values. For example, it articulated the Star’s editorial position from the first half of the 20th century as largely tied to three things: that citizens of the District of Columbia should have the same voting rights and representation as other US citizens; that the United States should accept a financial obligation to DC; and ‘that The Star report the news objectively, without bias’ (Beveridge and Forbes, 1981). Elsewhere, Star journalists told the story of what the end of the paper was like for them, using the obituary mode. For one, ‘People said it was like a death in the family, and it was: telephone calls, telegrams, flowers. But it was worse. It was the death of a family’ (McGrory, 1981).

Covering its own death, the Bulletin also turned to the obituary mode to craft its history: ‘While we have tried to approach our obituary with dignity and objectivity, it is an impossible assignment. Most of us loved this place. And we believe that what we did mattered for something’ (Ammerman, 1982). This comment suggests that the Bulletin articulated its history with a strong commemorative tone, and this played out across the paper. The main page-1 story opened with a one-sentence lead – ‘The Bulletin died today’ – and the headline for the continuation inside read ‘1847–1982: It was a long and happy life’ (Morrison, 1982). Thus accessed, commemoration spreads over an entire special section remembering the Bulletin.

Twenty-seven years later, the Post-Intelligencer and the Rocky Mountain News, much like the Bulletin, both published what were separate and clearly commemorative sections. Announcing their engagement with memory work, the Seattle and Denver papers blended the obituary mode with institutional histories to a greater extent than the Star and the Bulletin; the stories acknowledge such. In the Rocky Mountain News, a reporter wrote,

Despite the hundreds of life stories I’ve told – after all of the tear-smeared drives returning from funerals – this remains one of the most difficult.

When I arrived at the Rocky, I was known primarily as an obituary writer. I wanted to tell the stories that might be lost. I wanted to tell them for the last time.

We’re not trained to write obituaries in the first person. (Sheeler, 2009)

Here, Sheeler is applying the desire to ‘tell the stories that might be lost’ to the closing of the Rocky Mountain News, implying concern with the future absence of the paper, and how it would be remembered. In the Post-Intelligencer, Carol Smith expressed similar sentiments:

Writing obituaries is a rite of passage for journalists – a first beat for cub reporters, and often the last for those who’ve been around long enough to have covered, or been friends or enemies with, those whose passings they note.

Eventually, a gut-punch of an obit comes along. Now it’s our turn. (Smith, 2009)

The main stories about the closing in both the Rocky Mountain News and the Post-Intelligencer began with this commemorative tone. Of the former paper, one of its reporters wrote,

It came into being on a dark night two years before the Civil War’s first gunshots, survived a flood that washed away its press and countless threats to its very existence, then enjoyed, in the twilight of its life, recognition as one of the best newspapers in the country.

But today marks the final milestone in the storied history of the Rocky Mountain News, Colorado’s first newspaper and oldest continually operated business. (Vaughn, 2009)

In the Post-Intelligencer, Smith’s narrative of the paper began in a more strictly obituary mode as well, and also deviated rapidly; her self-reflexive comments about obituary writing quoted above were the fourth and fifth graphs of her story.

The obituary style allowed access to commemoration that, in turn, permitted the calls to memory and assertions of interpretive authority found in all four final editions. At the moment of the Rocky Mountain News’ demise, ‘the paper passes from chronicler of a city, state and region’s history into history itself’ (Vaughn, 2009). Sheeler brought together memory and interpretive authority:

The Rocky’s offspring will live on in the stories – nearly 150 years’ worth – clipped and pasted in scrapbooks, hanging on refrigerators, yellowing in museums, lingering in countless minds. Their power is one that, for a few minutes or a few hours, takes the readers to places they’ve never been, places they need to go. (Sheeler, 2009)

In the Post-Intelligencer, Smith (2009) closed her story by connecting memory and the historical authority of newspapers: ‘And when our lives changed overnight – when President Kennedy was slain, or the Twin Towers fell, or President Obama was elected – it was the next day’s newspaper that people thought of saving’.

Both of these newspapers then, are not just memory texts, but memory objects – artifacts, aligned with the use of that term by Kitch (2003). The very front page of the Rocky Mountain News’ final edition illustrates this. In a farewell message titled ‘Goodbye, Colorado’ (2009), the newspaper issued this double call to remembrance: ‘We hope Coloradans will remember this newspaper fondly from generation to generation, a reminder of Denver’s history – the ambitions, foibles and virtues of its settlers and those who followed’. Coloradans are to remember the newspaper, and in the future, this newspaper, the final edition, will be the key to remembering Denver’s history and its own.

Embodiment, embalming, and the dematerialization of news

In all four final editions, news was not dying, nor was every newspaper in these communities closing. Rather, specific daily print newspapers, and their rituals, traditions, and authority all ended. As Smith (2009) wrote in the Post-Intelligencer, ‘News will live on. This newspaper will not’.

The obituary mode allowed journalists to anthropomorphize the newspapers through language of death and disease – through embodiment analogies. One Bulletin columnist used mourning as a metaphor, writing, ‘In the last stages of death, we were tormented because we had to witness the last, final throes of life. We had to watch the body of a once-great newspaper grow frail and unresponsive’ (Lewis, 1982). A Star reporter wrote, ‘A newspaper is not typewriters and computers, or telephones and a distinctive typographical appearance. A newspaper is people’ (O’Leary, 1981).

The concern with the flesh overlaps concerns over technology. At the Bulletin, one cited cause of ‘afternoon newspaper disease’ was the paper’s inability to compete for timely news with evening television programs. Another article in the Post-Intelligencer quoted the novelist (and former staffer) Tom Robbins to draw a stark distinction between the visceral newspaper and the cold technology of the Internet:

There’s something about the way ink bleeds into the paper … There’s more soul there’, [Robbins] said. ‘Ink is the blood of language. Paper is the language’s flesh.

The flesh is dying now, here in Seattle and in many places.

… A story well-told will lose some of its flesh and blood, diminished by false urgency and backlit pixels. (Thiel, 2009)

The Star’s editorial page editor condemned television as an inferior form of public debate, writing, ‘A paragraph of reasoned discourse will never cease to offer better guidance to statecraft than flickering images and impressionistic statement’ (Yoder, 1981). A paragraph can be considered and revisited and reconsidered; television flows by. As another Star reporter wrote,

There is memory in newspapers, as there never is in television, but increasingly I think that ours is a society that prefers its memories short. And so maybe the lives of our newspapers have to end in tandem with the events they reported, thereby allowing our mistakes to be forgotten and our history to be periodically revised. (Bachrach, 1981)

Concern with technological and cultural shifts is common to all four papers; but a subtle difference exists between the papers that closed in the early 1980s and those that closed in 2009. The Star and Bulletin cited evening newscasts as one reason for their failures. For the Rocky and the Post-Intelligencer, the Internet was to blame. This difference highlights a concern common to all four of these newspapers: the dematerialization of news.

Fundamentally, the newspapers’ achievements are not the crux of the collective memory that they attempt to construct. Rather, the appeals to collective memory regard the newspaper’s cultural role. Once set in print, newspapers achieve fixity and thus a type of authority: past newspaper stories provide historical record of a sort, and a reliable, fixed well of authoritative material newspaper journalists can draw upon for both present and future aims, and to which those journalists can refer their readers. As this article has demonstrated, journalists can say how they did journalism, and how good it was for the communities holding stakes in these newspapers – and can leave that record behind.

Perhaps more importantly, fixity functions in two other ways. First, it conceals the fact that all news is ephemeral. Second, it reveals that the newspaper, while ephemeral, serves as a totemic object around which the rituals of news production and news consumption circle. The eradication of a newspaper is the eradication of the ritual centerpiece of two ritual communities: the journalists themselves, who comprise the paper, and newspaper readers. This is how the assumption of Benjamin’s aura by the Star functions (Kaplan, 1981).

Claims to an aura both arise from and point to the tribal, cultic nature of journalism practice. Journalists have their own sinners and saints; in these final editions, hagiographies were written of journalists past and present. The newspaper, above all else, is a thing that serves as the centerpiece of ritual activity; the physical, material newspaper is the center of numerous rituals of both journalistic production and news consumption.

The newspapers’ communities can be thought of like an hourglass, with the sands of meaning shifting from journalists to readers and back. The newspaper operates at the waist of the hourglass, and that is the center of meaning-making for these communities. By constructing memory texts, journalists project their vision of their newspapers through the hourglass to their readers. But there is no opportunity for backflow once a newspaper closes. A final edition is the final opportunity for present-day meaning-making. The day after, and the day after that, and today, all that remains is the final edition. The negotiation of meaning with journalists about journalistic text is over. What remains is a final text that, with the eradication of the community of journalists who constructed it, becomes uneditable, uncorrectable – fully fixed. This particular fixity allows for prospective memory work.

The final editions ask readers to carry forward the collective memories the newspapers attempt to establish. Journalists ask readers, as an interpretive community, to inscribe the proposed social meaning and function of the newspaper-as-institution onto the final newspaper-as-text, and into readers’ own memories. In fact, the presumed ritual role of the reader in the news community is crucial to understanding the function of memory work in these final editions. Newspapers are ritually offered to readers on their doorsteps, in their mailboxes, and at newsstands. Readers respond to these offerings not as a community of scribes, but as a community of inscribers. Readers adopt the truth of what is offered to them in newspapers, question that truth, or reject it.

Consider the Catholic Communion as an analogue. What makes a disc of unleavened bread something else is the action of a priest combined with the worshipper’s agreement that the action truthfully transforms the disc into flesh. Similarly, the interpretive actions of journalists alone do not make news meaningful; readers must agree that journalists have the authority to take those actions. Readers’ assent can be found in the rituals of news consumption: by reading the newspaper over coffee in the morning, on the train to work, or, in the past, taking in an evening paper after supper. Even if readers negotiate separate or disparate meanings for each individual news story, participation in the overall endeavor, expressed by participation in rituals of consumption, suggests that readers accept the wider social meaning and functions of newspapers and the interpretive work of journalists.

The production of meaning for a newspaper depends on both journalists and readers participating in the same vessel of meaning-making – a fixed vessel. It may change every day, and it may have replicants, but we know that – according to the journalists who compose it – the vessel is the newspaper. As Kaplan (1981) wrote, ‘No matter that several hundred thousand copies exist; every one of them is the last Star’.

But these observations, while intriguing, are not especially new, nor is the critical move of integrating ritual into the analysis of journalism (Ehrlich, 1996). Rather, the analysis above reinforces the ritual view of communication (Carey, 1989 [2009]) while showing how newspaper journalists quite clearly understand how their institutions help define reality, even as the news articles represent asymmetric power relationships that exist between journalists (and their newspapers) and their readers. Quite some time ago, Elliott offered that press ritual may be ‘a structured performance in which not all participants are equal’ (Elliott, 1980: 145). Under normal circumstances, this is true in the relationship between readers and journalists (and newspapers); even if readers agree to receive the host of the newspaper, journalists are the priests who bless it. However, as newspapers disappear, through the process of dematerializing, and at the moment of final dematerialization, we see quite a remarkable shift in power.

If the newspaper, in Carey’s view, has served to order reality and life, its demise disorders the same. As suggested early in this article, multiple dematerializations occur. The communities of journalists at each newspaper fly apart, the communities of readers are severed from the communities of journalists, and each newspaper loses its physical existence. The final edition, with regard to dematerialization, is again doubly reflexive, for it is both the product of and the presentation of the process of dematerializing. To borrow Zelizer’s (2010) notion of the subjunctive voice in journalism, these final editions are in fact both ‘as-is’ and ‘as-if’ texts. The ‘as-is’ aspect inheres in material finality: these are final editions, and there will be no more. The ‘as-if’ aspect is expressed because that finality is contingent and produced through dematerializing: the journalists work until they don’t, and that final deadline is not final until it has passed. But at the end, these newspapers are not about to die; they have died.

The symbolic content of these newspapers, the ‘as-if’ aspect, is the product of performing dematerialization – performing being about to die. In the case of failed newspapers, the locus of participation is in meaning-making shifts. Regardless of whether the power lies with institutions, or as suggested earlier, lies in mutual assent that the newspaper constitutes the world, moving forward in time from the publication of these final editions, power shifts to the audience. The audience is no longer complicit only in meaning-making, for in these final editions, they are asked to commit to acts of future memory. While the immediate community of newspaper readers is gone, each of those readers still exists; they are not the ones about to die. And so they are asked to remember the newspapers, suggesting that even as final, fixed texts, these texts are in fact contingent. Thus, the fight against contingency may explain the persistent and pervasive expressions of worry for the future, and the attempt to cement the meaning of the past in present minds. Fixity was the concern of the past; memory is the concern of the future.

Yet through memory, fixity is pursued. The Star’s editorial page editor expressed the desire, if not for permanence, then for a permanent cultural role for newspapers such as his:

I can only believe that a newspaper’s ultimate value resides in its history, character and spirit – in the memory of good men and women who give it moments of courage and distinction. Those qualities, fortunately, are not extinguished by the physical death of newspapers. Their presses may stop, their custodians of a season disperse, but something larger endures. For me, the New York Herald Tribune, never better than on the day it died, is immortal. I believe The Star will be also. A century on, I fancy, historians will be searching its files, trying to decipher their dusty and cryptic witness to past times. (Yoder, 1981)

Indeed. At once, these final editions seek, metaphorically, to embody and to embalm the newspaper. Anthropomorphic language of disease and death embodies; memory work embalms. A dead body is the ritual centerpiece of mourning. A dead friend, beloved, relative, or colleague creates a final nexus for different communities, which have different understandings of the meaning of that person’s life. And if whatever animates a life can be considered an aura, that aura is gone. The final edition of a newspaper provides what Kaplan called the ‘snapshot’ of the Star’s aura; bodily remains are a snapshot of what a person was at the moment of death. The body is embalmed for a final viewing, the face artificially rosy to leave us with a final memory of the person, concealing the brutal fact that what remains is a bloodless husk – to mask the dissipation of the aura, to hide the imminent dematerialization of the body. But, we hope, as do the journalists at these closed newspapers, that the life led was worthy of a final commemoration – and the creation of permanent, lasting memories – before disposal.

Conclusion

The final editions of closed newspapers generate exceptionally complicated and intriguing examples of metajournalistic discourse. Although journalists have an exclusive professional opportunity to address the meaning of their profession at moments when their profession enters crisis, in these four cases, they turned to a variety of memory techniques that reveal the dematerialization of the newspaper as a fundamental concern.

Dematerialization – and dematerializing – matter because of the contingency on which they rest. At these final moments, news, and through it, communities of journalists and readers, and their constructions and understandings of the world at large, remain contingent. The process of dematerializing forces journalists into discomfiting recognition of such contingency. As shown above, this is manifest in bald-faced appeals to future collective memory, using reinterpretations and interpolations of the social role and cultural authority of newspapers’ presents and pasts. These final editions starkly show the limits of what journalists at these newspapers can achieve, because control over their future memory lies entirely with their audience. It also asks us to consider whether the daily newspaper, once put to bed, is contingent as well; notions such as paradigm repair (Bennett et al., 1985; Berkowitz, 2000; Carlson, 2012; Reese, 1990) suggest that, perhaps, it is.

Dematerialization further suggests that, perhaps, the various eras of newspaper crisis are not distinct. Rather, they may be continuous, an epoch of fear and mourning, of personal and professional worry, of trauma and memory, running from the dawn of radio to today. The newspaper as material product has been winding a long, slow road to unviability. Studying the memories that failed newspapers construct about themselves ultimately may be a way to trace the evolution of how the interpretive community of newspaper journalists articulates and remembers the social meaning of its profession, of how those journalists want to remind us to remember that meaning in the future, and of how the journalists themselves want to be remembered.