Will Steacy: Deadline (Vol. 1 - Newspaper) by Will Steacy (2015-08-01)

Will Steacy spent five years photographing the newsroom and printing plant of The Philadelphia Inquirer. Through a depiction of The Inquirer's efforts to prevail despite shrinking advertising revenue, falling circulation, lay-offs, buy-outs, and bankruptcy, Steacy reveals the challenges and harsh realities that confront the newspaper industry today. In the first of the two Deadline publications Steacy presents an 80-page newspaper featuring photographs of The Inquirer newsroom and press he made between 2009-2013, along with images from The Inquirer's archive, and photographs, letters, news clips and other ephemera from his own family's five generation newsman history. The Deadline newspaper also features 70 original essays by current and former Inquirer newsroom staff (including 16 Pulitzer Prize winners) discussing The Inquirer's history, its legendary rise from one of the worst papers in America to one of the best, the challenges and triumphs of working in today's newsroom environment, and reflections on the future of newspapers and journalism. We rarely ever get to hear the storytellers tell their own story, but Deadline fills that void as the voices of those who spent their career in the newsroom guide us through Steacy's photographs and archival imagery with first hand accounts of the history of the third oldest daily newspaper in America. Having shed more than 40% of its workforce in the past decade, newspapers are the fastest shrinking industry in America, yet more than half of America has heard little to nothing about the financial struggles that have eviscerated newsrooms. Deadline not only provides us an open window into the realities of an industry in crisis, but also explains how and why we got there.