about
Since February 2020, I've been collecting newspapers lying unsold and unread. Reams of broadsheets and tabloids have been stacked outside newsagents and train stations to be collected as waste, while public libraries have confiscated and quarantined their deliveries until they're far too old for visitors to read.
This project explores the fate of newspapers over coronavirus. Newspapers strike us with a singular, day-in-the-life kind of quality, as though their headlines and images served to frank a unique and individual moment by screaming, "this is today! Read all about it!". I'm interested in how the form of the newspaper produces this sense of indexicality; stories must first be gathered and edited, then they are cropped and cut to be arranged on its pages, then they are printed, and then distributed through the night to meet us first thing in the morning. Hence the 24 hour news cycle twelve hours for 'today' to 'happen', another twelve for the news to be produced and disseminated.
The pandemic has contracted this cycle and subsequently lent daily newspapers a curiously historic quality. Although readership has been declining for decades (see link), the virus has accelerated this tendency with lockdown’s closure of public spaces. Dozens of papers have subsequently advertised on their own front pages discounted subscriptions to keep their circulation afloat, as though they had just launched for the very first time. What entices us about a newspaper - its arrangement of words on the page, its colours, its choice of headlines and images, its quality of 'this is today!' - feels out of sync with a situation saturated with constantly changing, digital news. Exploring this tension, Presstracker is a first-of-its-kind archive, drawing together real-time data with ‘hardcopy’ news.
Each of the newspapers in the archive have been scanned, uploaded, and then digitally split along their headlines, images, article content, and sheet. These papers have been kindly gifted from public libraries around London. You can view and interact with them along Public Health England's infection rate curve on the homepage.
