Kevin G. Barnhurst

Really kind of a mixed up book, that begins as an interesting description of how the design of newspapers changed throughout U.S. history, and ends up being a cliched, Foucauldian critique of the newspaper industry. Some of the arguments they develop in the second half are quite fanciful, and they make many completely unsubstantiated claims about how readers responded to design changes. The authors obviously know a lot about their subject, and the finished work strikes me as a missed opportunity for a clearly presented history of newspaper design, though the authors would undoubtedly counter that the kind of book I'm imaginining is always already implicated in contradictory power relations and could never actually be written. The book would have benefited from more illustrations (instead of textual references to illustrations published elsewhere), and more detailed discussion of the specific illustrations actually provided. The most detailed examination of actual newspaper design comes in a tedious chapter on how presidential deaths were represented in newspapers--tedious because this section is really more about how Americans (supposedly) viewed the presidency in unusual moments of crisis, than about typical newspaper design of each period. Authors could have skipped the chapter on web design, since that is such a rapidly changing area, and they don't even acknowledge that the look of any web newspaper depends (right down to the font) on the device the reader is using--nevermind readers using assistive technology like screen readers.… (mais)