Journalism Studies

ISSN: 1461-670X (Print) 1469-9699 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjos20

The Smells, Sights, and Pleasures of Ink on Paper:

The Consumption of Print Newspapers During a
Period Marked by Their Crisis

Pablo J. Boczkowski, Eugenia Mitchelstein & Facundo Suenzo

To cite this article: Pablo J. Boczkowski, Eugenia Mitchelstein & Facundo Suenzo (2019): The
Smells, Sights, and Pleasures of Ink on Paper: The Consumption of Print Newspapers During a
Period Marked by Their Crisis, Journalism Studies, DOI: 10.1080/1461670X.2019.1670092

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/1461670X.2019.1670092

Published online: 30 Sep 2019.

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JOURNALISM STUDIES
https://doi.org/10.1080/1461670X.2019.1670092

The Smells, Sights, and Pleasures of Ink on Paper:

The Consumption of Print Newspapers During
a Period Marked by Their Crisis
a b
Pablo J. Boczkowski , Eugenia Mitchelstein and Facundo Suenzob
a
Department of Communication Studies, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA; bDepartment of Social
Sciences, Universidad de San Andrés, Victoria, Argentina

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
Much has been written about the crisis of print newspapers, but Print newspapers; newspaper
with more attention paid to issues of production and distribution reading; news consumption;
rather than reception. Furthermore, the scholarship on materiality; journalism;
audiences
contemporary print newspaper reception has been limited by a
focus on the information dimension and on countries in the
Global North. To help overcome these limitations, in this paper we
ask two questions that inquire into the reception of print
newspapers in the contemporary media environment, and do so
within a country from the Global South. Drawing upon an analysis
of 158 semi-structured interviews conducted in the City of Buenos
Aires and other parts of the country, we find that people continue
reading print newspapers not solely, or even primarily, for the
information contained in their pages, but for dynamics that tie
together news content with materiality, routinization, and larger
practices of incorporation of this media artifact into their daily
lives. These dynamics are partly shaped by distinctive aspects of
the Argentine context, including business strategies, family rituals,
urban patterns, and a culture of nostalgia.

Print newspapers have had a dramatic decline in readership and revenue, and a concomi-
tant reduction in staff and resources, over the past couple of decades. For instance, in the
United States, there was a loss of 9.4 millions of copies in total weekday circulation news-
papers, and of 8.7 millions of copies in total Sunday circulation, between 2014 and 2017
(Pew Research Center 2018). A comparable trend happened in the United Kingdom,
where circulation of national newspaper titles decreased from almost 30 million in 2003
to slightly over 12 million in 2017 (Ofcom 2018). Scholars have aimed to understand the
causes, dynamics, and implications of this significant change in the media landscape
(Doyle 2013; Meyers and Davidson 2014; Ananny and Crawford 2015; Schlesinger and
Doyle 2015; Usher 2015; Nelson 2018). Despite its valuable contributions, this scholarship
has also been limited by two patterns. First, most of the research has examined issues per-
taining to the production and distribution of news content, with less attention paid to
understand how transformations in the dynamics of news consumption have shaped
the decay of print newspapers. In addition, the research on newspaper readership has

CONTACT Pablo J. Boczkowski pjb9@northwestern.edu

© 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 P. J. BOCZKOWSKI ET AL.

largely focused on either readers’ attributes or media variables, and—with a few notable
exceptions—paid much less attention to how the broader character of everyday life con-
tributes to shape the reception of print newspapers. Second, while the decay of print
newspapers has taken place in many countries around the world, the vast majority of
the scholarship has focused on countries in the Global North.
To help overcome these limitations, in this paper we ask two questions. First, how is the
reception of print newspapers in the contemporary environment shaped by the larger pat-
terns of everyday life that contextualize it? Second, what are some of the distinct features
in which this process takes place in a national context outside of the Global North? We
answer these questions by analyzing 158 semi-structured interviews conducted
between March 2016 and December 2017 with adults in the City of Buenos Aires and
its suburbs, and in several other cities around the country. Argentina is a highly suitable
national context to bring a Global South complement to the dominant geographic
focus of the existing scholarship for two reasons. First, it is a country that had a strong
print newspaper culture during the twentieth century. For instance, there were more
than a dozen national newspapers at the end of that century, which is remarkable for a
country with a population of slightly over forty million. Second, print newspapers have
declined notably in recent years. Between 2006 and 2016, Clarín, the largest daily newspa-
per, lost almost half of its daily net circulation, and its main competitor, La Nación, more
than a fifth (SINCA, n.d.). Furthermore, 1791 print newsroom jobs disappeared from
2017 to 2018 (FOPEA 2019). In the next section we outline our conceptual apparatus,
then describe our methodology, followed by a presentation of our findings, and conclude
by discussing their theoretical and societal implications.

Theoretical Considerations
We situate our analysis at the intersection of three different domains of inquiry: (a) we
draw from studies on the crisis of print newspapers to situate our object of study within
larger contemporary media patterns; (b) we are informed by research that has specifically
examined the reading of print newspapers to identify issues of continuity and discontinu-
ity with our findings; and (c) we resort to theorizing about the texto-materiality of media to
help make sense of the imbrication of content and technology into the broader character
of everyday life.

Scholarship on the Crisis of Print Newspapers

Print newspapers have been a central element of the information ecosystem for centuries.
Thus, it is not surprising that their decline over the past few decades has been studied pro-
fusely, as Siles and Boczkowski (2012b) showed in their review essay on the “print newspaper
crisis.” During the past seven years, most scholarship on this topic has revolved around three
areas of analysis: economic dynamics, work and occupational matters, and societal impact.
Regarding the economic dimension, the analysis has oscillated between highlighting
factors about both the demise of newspapers and their survival (Siapera, Papadopoulou,
and Archontakis 2015; Kolo 2016; Martínez-Fernández, Castellanos-García, and Juanatey-
Boga 2016; van der Burg and Van den Bulck 2017). Several studies have centered on
 JOURNALISM STUDIES 3

how the crisis has affected business models (Doyle 2013; Brandstetter and Schmalhofer
2014; Rothmann and Koch 2014; Eriksson, Akesson, and Lund 2016).
Concerning work and occupational matters, studies have examined issues such as journal-
ists’ professional values (Bardan 2015; Hofstetter and Schoenhagen 2017; Sarrimo 2017; Reich
2018), changing labor conditions (Meyers and Davidson 2014, 2016; Cohen 2015; Siapera,
Papadopoulou, and Archontakis 2015; Davidson and Meyers 2016; O’Donnell, Zion, and Sher-
wood 2016; Sarrimo 2017), field boundaries (Meyers and Davidson 2014; Ananny and Craw-
ford 2015; Graves and Konieczna 2015; Beckers et al. 2017; Johnson and Kelling 2018),
organizational changes (Anderson and Kreiss 2013; Ananny 2014; Conboy and Steel 2014;
Usher 2015; Brüggemann et al. 2016; Carlson and Usher 2016; Evans 2016; Hofstetter and
Schoenhagen 2017), and the dynamics of innovation (Rothmann and Koch 2014; Schlesinger
and Doyle 2015; Villi and Hayashi 2017; Lehtisaari et al. 2018).
Accounts of the societal impact of the newspaper crisis have looked at media owner-
ship, public accountability, and trust (Doyle 2015; Cornia 2016; Hassid and Repnikova
2016; Starke, Naab, and Scherer 2016; Fang 2017; Goyanes and Rodríguez-Gómez 2018;
Mor and Reich 2018; Rubado and Jennings 2019), and changing relationships between
journalists and the public (Holton, Coddington, and Gil de Zúñiga 2013; Wadbring and
Bergström 2017; Nelson 2018; Nelson and Tandoc 2018).
Two common patterns cut across the valuable contributions made by this diverse scho-
larship on the newspaper crisis. First, with a handful of notable exceptions (Papathanasso-
poulos et al. 2013; Fortunati, Taipale, and Farinosi 2015; Wadbring and Bergström 2017;
Thurman 2018; Kormelink and Meijer 2019; Thurman and Fletcher 2019), the vast majority
of the studies have examined issues of production and distribution of newspaper content,
not their consumption. Second, from both geographic and cultural dimensions, there is an
overwhelming dominance of research on the Global North. Our study aims to build on the
path developed by the above-mentioned exceptions, and to add a focus on the Global
South. To this end, we draw upon research on print newspaper reading, most of which
was conducted before the period defined by the industry crisis.

Research on Print Newspaper Reading

Traditional approaches to studying the reading of print newspapers have often been either
people- or media-centric. People-centered scholarship has examined the role of factors
such as education, age, and gender in accounting for variations in who reads newspapers
(Barnhurst and Wartella 1991; Burgoon and Burgoon 1980; Elvestad and Blekesaune 2008;
Peiser 2000; Poindexter and McCombs 2001; Salisbury 1981; Thurman and Fletcher 2019).
Media-centric studies have included foci on the different uses and gratifications that
influence newspaper reading and their possible replacement by other media (Shoemaker
1996; Althaus and Tewksbury 2000; Hastall 2009; Lee 2013), and on the emergence of habitua-
lization in media choice when confronted with multiplicity of options (LaRose and Eastin 2004;
Diddi and LaRose 2006; Tewksbury, Hals, and Bibart 2008; Lee and Delli Carpini 2010).
These two streams of scholarship have made important contributions to understanding
the demographic and content factors that drive newspaper reading, but have not been
well equipped to shed light on how these factors are affected by the broader routines
that shape readers’ everyday lives. Recent work has shed light on these dynamics for
print newspapers and other types of media (Larsen 2000; Martin 2008; Ytre-Arne 2011;
4 P. J. BOCZKOWSKI ET AL.

Swart, Peters, and Broersma 2017). Two of these studies are particularly valuable in the
context of our paper. First, Fortunati, Taipale & Farinosi examine “print and online news-
papers starting from their very essence as physical configurations” (2015, 5), and find
that their respective users “have a different ritualization, different degrees of freedom in
their use practices with newspapers, different reading styles, different emotions,
different effectiveness of memorization and they use different gestures and postures”
(2015, 23). Second, building on the premise that people’s embodied ways of knowing
shape their news consumption experiences, Kormelink and Costera Meijer concluded
that “news devices and platforms also invite and inhibit different ways of physically—
and often manually—handling and navigating them, resulting in different ways of enga-
ging with news content” (2019, 14). In this paper, we draw upon the perspectives
advanced by these two influential studies to focus not so much on the materiality of
these platforms, but on the intersection of this materiality with the broader routines
that give shape to everyday life.

Theories of Texto-materiality
The connection across materiality, information, and daily habits stems from the ontology
of media artifacts as both “cultural material and material culture” (Boczkowski and Liev-
rouw 2008, 955). To make sense of the intersection of technology, content, and routiniza-
tion involved in the appropriation of the print newspaper during this period of crisis, we
adopt a texto-material perspective on the use of media artifacts (Siles and Boczkowski
2012b). This perspective is based on the notion that “because material and interpretive
practices are often intertwined, explanations based on factors affecting one set of prac-
tices but not the other run the risk of missing the variance that arises from their interde-
pendencies” (Siles and Boczkowski 2012a, 234). People’s everyday routines envelop their
material and interpretive practices, and to a certain extent shape them. Thus, although
sometimes these routines have nothing to do with the media they interact, they might
nonetheless affect their consumption.
The texto-material approach builds upon a tradition of scholarship that has addressed
the relationship between objects and subjects in the constitution of the social world
(Appadurai 1986; Alexander 2010; Plotnick 2015; Dominguez Rubio 2016; Benzecry and
Domínguez Rubio 2018). Of particular relevance for the goals of this paper, Alexander
has invited to think about how people’s encounter with material artifacts is “experienced
aesthetically” (Alexander 2010, 13). According to him, “contact with this aesthetic surface,
whether by sight, smell, taste, sound or touch, provides a sensual experience that trans-
mits meaning. The iconic is about experience, not communication” (Alexander 2010,
11). Along these lines, Dominguez Rubio (2016) has urged to theorize “not in terms of
objects, but in terms of the discursive and material conditions and practices under
which certain things can be rendered possible, effective and reproducible as objects
endowed with particular kinds of value, meaning, and power” (2016, 60).
Informed by scholarship discussed in this section, in this paper we aim to answer the
following research questions:
RQ 1: How are the practices of reading the print newspaper in the contemporary environment
shaped by the dynamics of everyday life?
 JOURNALISM STUDIES 5

RQ: What are some of the distinct features in which this process takes place in a national
context outside of the Global North?

To answer these questions we adopt an ethnographic approach that is best suited to

capture the imbrication of the content and materiality of newspaper reading within the
broader patterns of everyday life.

Methodology
We analyze data from one-hundred-and-fifty-eight semi-structured interviews—56%
female and 44% male—conducted face-to-face by a team of research assistants in Argen-
tina between March 2016 and December 2017. The interviews aimed to explore the con-
sumption of news, entertainment, and technology. They were not guided by a strict
questionnaire, but by the goal of following the flow of the conversation led by each inter-
viewee. In other words, the research assistants were instructed to proceed with an ethno-
graphic sensibility mostly aimed at capturing the emic perspective instead of structuring
the conversation around analyst’s categories. Because we draw upon information volunta-
rily provided by the participants about their reading and nonreading newspaper experi-
ences, it is difficult to estimate the prevalence of different types of experiences in the
population.
The recruitment process centered primarily on snowball sampling (Heckathorn 2011);
after an initial set of interviewees was contacted, they were then invited to share contacts
potentially reached out for interviewing. The suggested persons were contacted on a
random basis, and the process was then repeated with subsequent interviewees. Inter-
viewers also reached out to some potential participants in public spaces. All interviews
were tape-recorded and fully transcribed, with an average length of approximately 33 min.
The interviewees constitute a convenience sample of Argentine adults. Their mean age
was forty-years-old. The interviews were conducted mostly in the City of Buenos Aires and
the main adjacent suburbs, but some also took place in the provinces of Córdoba, Salta,
Santa Fe, and San Juan—thus, representing regions in the East, West, and North of the
country, but not in the South. Participants held a wide range of occupations, such as
high-school and college students, factory and construction workers, private sector
employees, attorneys, professors, cooks, teachers, security guards, housekeepers, psycho-
analysts, designers, accountants, programmers, and retirees. Furthermore, the levels of
educational attainment were as follows: 35% had obtained a high-school degree or less;
22% were college students; 38% had an associate or bachelor college degree; and 5%
had received a graduate degree.
The data were analyzed through three rounds of coding by the authors, following a
grounded theory approach (Corbin and Strauss 2008). After the interviews were tran-
scribed, we went through an open coding phase to identify possible themes. Then,
once those themes were identified, we undertook a second round of coding to look for
specific categories and their properties (Glaser 2007). Finally, we conducted a third
round of coding to determine relationships across categories and properties. Once we
reached a theoretical saturation of the emergent analytical categories (Glaser and
Strauss 2017), we ended the analysis process. The quotes included in this paper were
translated from Spanish into English by authors, who are bilingual. The names of the inter-
viewees were turned into pseudonyms for confidentiality purposes.
6 P. J. BOCZKOWSKI ET AL.

Findings
Our analysis shows the existence of a complex dynamic that subtends the incorporation of
the print newspaper into the fabric of daily life. This dynamic is visible in the following
dimensions: the practices and rituals of accessing the artifact; the temporal and spatial
coordinates that shape this occurrence; the character of the embodied experience; the
patterns of sociability; and the processes of interpretation. Thus, in the paragraphs that
follow we summarize the findings about each of these dimensions. We conclude this
section with a brief examination of the practices of print newspaper non-reading.

Access
Reading the news in print starts with encountering the artifact. Most interviewees com-
mented that it is more common for them to have a subscription than to purchase
single copies in the newsstand. Readers often said that they “receive” their copies at
home, or that the paper just “arrives” every Sunday. Lucas, a thirty-year-old attorney,
stated, “the newspaper gets to my house on Sunday.” Carolina, a twenty-four-year-old
undergraduate, noted that her “sister gets La Nación [newspaper] on Sunday, so when I
go to her place I like to read the print newspaper there.” The persistence of the subscrip-
tion model is a naturalization of the tie that connects the artifact with its public. A factor
that further reinforces this model is the existence of incentive systems offered by the top
publishers whereby regular subscribers to their print products get additional benefits,
from book collections to discounts at restaurants and movie theatres. “I have subscribed
to La Nación back because the Saturday edition comes with books by [Argentine writer,
Jorge Luis] Borges,” said José, a twenty-four-year-old public-sector employee. Thus,
these subscribers often get the newspaper not because of its content, but to save
money with non-newspaper related purchases.
These incentive systems can have a paradoxical effect, at least among some subscri-
bers. Several interviewees mentioned that because they subscribed to the print newspa-
per for these additional benefits, they rarely paid attention to the news content. Kevin, a
twenty-three-year-old college student, commented that he “doesn’t like the print [news-
paper]. I’ve had it because I was subscribed to promotional clubs such as Clarín 365, which
makes it compulsory for you to get the [Clarín] print paper. I don’t like it to the extent that I
end up not reading the newspaper [that way].” Andrea, a thirty-one-year-old photogra-
pher who does not like the editorial perspective of Clarín either, told a story about how
her household ended up receiving it because of the loyalty program:
We get Clarín at home. It’s something very bizarre. We get it because some time ago [my
husband] one day said, “I subscribed to have the 365 [card] of Clarín.” And I thought it was
terrible … The fact that we get Clarín is already terrible, and that it comes here because of
the 365 [card], is even worse.

Another way of getting a hold of the print artifact, which was not mutually exclusive with
either subscription or single-issue purchase, is when people encountered it in venues such
as coffee houses and restaurants and had down time to read it. Mario, a forty-one-year-old
attorney, did not purchase a newspaper, but “if I go to a bar to get a coffee in the morning,
I glance at the print paper” that is available. Susana, a seventy-seven-year-old housewife,
shared a similar practice: “when I am at a place that has a newspaper, I grab it and read it. I
 JOURNALISM STUDIES 7

like to read the news! But I don’t buy the newspaper.” Hortensia, who is fifty-eight years of
age, noted that she often goes “to bars and I always ask for the print newspaper. I consume
whichever newspaper is available.” Mario, Susana, and Hortensia do not visit these
places to read newspapers, but take advantage of their presence once they encounter
then. Thus, access to print newspapers is often shaped, at least in part, by non-news
primary routines.

Time and Space

These different ways of accessing the print newspaper are tied to varying temporal and
spatial coordinates that are independent of newspaper content but nonetheless influence
its consumption. Interviewees who subscribed to the print newspaper tended to do so
more for the Sunday edition than for the daily edition. Patricia, a seventy-seven-year-old
retiree, gets the newspaper that day because “it more or less a synthesis … of what I can
get on either the radio or the television” during the work week. Reading the Sunday news-
paper tended to be connected to the home environment and the late-morning-to-late-after-
noon time. Consistent with the prior research, this was a fairly routinized pattern that was
generally complemented with other activities such as having breakfast. Mabel, a retired
sixty-two-year-old interviewee, commented that the newspaper “is already at the doorstep
when I get up on Sunday, so I read it while I drink some mates.” Thus, the rhythms of Sunday
life, in particular the connection to routine family gatherings, contribute to influence news-
paper reception among some interviews.
The temporal and spatial dimensions are also important to newspaper reading during
the work week for some participants. Mónica, a fifty-one-year-old high-school teacher, said
that she begins “the day having breakfast and reading the newspaper. I do this every day
of the week.” “When I wake up in the morning, I turn the radio on for a few minutes until I
get up and have breakfast. I read the print newspaper while I eat breakfast,” noted Carlos, a
fifty-eight-year-old accountant.
For other interviewees, reading the print newspaper on Sunday was often combined
with digital news consumption especially during the work week. Santiago, a forty-one-
year-old teacher, said he reads “digital news during the week, [but] during the weekend
there is nothing better than coffee with milk, croissants, and the newspaper.” Juana, a
twenty-two-year-old undergraduate student, put it as follows:
I get in the car [to go to college] and I’m reading a news story [on my phone]. I get to the uni-
versity and while I enter the building I read another story. And it’s like that. (…) I touch the
print newspaper sometimes during the weekend. Because my parents are subscribed and
read it, and I generally [do the same while I] have breakfast with them.

By contrast, reading the newspaper in public places appeared to be practice linked to the
work-week. Mariana, a forty-one-year-old physician, said she usually learns about current
events “on the television, [and] maybe in a bar or the bar of the university I look at El
Tribuno newspaper.” Gaston, a twenty-four-year-old public-sector employee, commented
that a couple of times per week he has lunch at a McDonald’s in downtown restaurant in
Buenos Aires right before going to class for his graduate program: “because in McDonald’s
there is sector with all the newspapers … So, if you arrive early, you get the newspapers
that are floating around. There was one available, so I grabbed it.” Thus, reading print
newspapers sometimes seems to be a by-product of spending time in public places—
8 P. J. BOCZKOWSKI ET AL.

that is, interviewees did not go to these places primarily to read the paper, but for other
reasons, and once at these places, they took advantage of their presence.

Embodiment
Several quotes above signal the importance of the embodied dimension as central to the
encounter with the print newspaper, in particular the role of the sensory experience—
which often transported readers to past times—and nostalgic sensations emerged from
the encounter with the medium. Hector, a forty-seven-year-old businessman, put it as
follows: “The truth is that I like newsprint, the smell of ink, which is a thing you carry
from your youth … Staining your hands with ink brings a very special emotion.” Along
the same lines, Marta, a fifty-two-year-old female psychoanalyst, added that “I like to
hold the newspaper … it’s like a different relationship, I don’t know, it might be an
affective, romantic thing.” These sensations transcend the consumption of a print newspa-
per on any given day, and they are not primarily related to specific media interests.
Issues of embodiment were also evident in the sequence of exploring the artifact and
the common practice of unbundling it into discrete parts. Although the front page is often
the first contact with information, many readers talked about enacting alternative
sequences of discovery. A particularly common one was going from back to front. Cristina,
a sixty-three-year-old housewife, can “look at the front cover … but maybe all of a sudden I
turn it back and begin to look at it from the last page, I don’t know why. It might be habit.”
Ricardo, a sixty-one-year-old who works at a convenient store, separated “the different sec-
tions and parts, like Entertainment, and things like that. Most likely I’ll begin with the news
and then will look at the rest.”
Some interviewees also underscored the importance of having the paper in their hands
to visually highlight some articles, and even clip stories that greatly interested them.
Ignacio, a twenty-four-year-old public-sector employee, noted that he feels “more comfor-
table” [with the print newspaper than with digital alternatives]: “it’s visual issue in part
because of an eye-sight problem. I don’t know, if I want to highlight or mark something
(…) I can clip it and take it with me.” Some contrasted the advantages of manipulating
this physical artifact with their experiences of reading on the screen. Romina, a nine-
teen-year-old college student, said that “holding [a print paper] in your hands gives you
a different feeling than reading on the Internet. It’s a bit difficult for me to read on the
screen, I get tired quite rapidly, so … I like it better in print.”

Sociability
The embodiment of newspaper reading sometimes is tied to it being a collective
activity, while on other occasions it is a solitary practice. For some interviewees, having
the newspaper at home invites a social experience of reading and sharing content
among family members. Reflecting about his childhood experiences and how they con-
tributed to the formation of his reading habits, Victor, a twenty-three-year-old student,
commented,
I used to read the newspaper since I was a kid. I used to wake up at seven in the morning to go
to school and my dad would leave the newspaper open in the Sports section. So, I would get
up and read only the sports news before going to school.
 JOURNALISM STUDIES 9

Family life also shaped the reading practices of Juana, the twenty-year-old undergradu-
ate, who noted that while her parents “read [the newspaper], I steal a couple of headlines
that grab my attention; otherwise, I read the Sunday magazine of La Nación a lot.” In other
situations, the collective dimension became evident not in affecting what each family
member read, but in the simple fact that everybody in the household read the paper.
Cecilia, a forty-nine-year-old housewife, said that “everybody, myself, my husband, and
my three kids, [reads the print newspaper]. The youngest child only reads the headlines,
but the other two read everything and so does my husband.” These collective practices
sometimes also included non-readers in the household who were then reached by the
content and practice of one or more readers. Jazmin, a forty-four-year-old, stated that
she did not read the newspaper but “her partner does and shares the ads with her. (…)
I learn about the news a lot from him. He says ‘wow, look at what happened’!”
In contrast, for other interviewees reading the newspaper appeared to be an individual
practice, both in their households and in public places. Carla, a forty-five-year-old attorney,
stated “part of the ritual [of reading the paper] is that I get a lot of printed press with all the
supplements, so the day begins with having breakfast on a table replete with newspapers
and magazines.” Marcelo, a twenty-eight-year-old administrative assistant, commented
that he reads print newspapers in coffee houses “only if I go by myself … but if I’m with
somebody else, then I do not.”
The preference for either a collective or an individual orientation towards the newspa-
per is tied to patterns of everyday life that exceed the information and material dimen-
sions of newspapers consumption. A similar trend applies to how readers interpret the
content they access.

Interpretation
The pathways whereby interviewees accessed the print newspaper, the temporal, spatial,
and social coordinates within which this took place, and the dynamics of embodiment, are
tied to how they interpreted the news—not what they interpreted from what they read,
but how the practices of interpretation were experienced. For some, like Patricia, the high-
school teacher, there was an enjoyment that shaped the activity of reading: “I like to read
[the newspaper] because it has to do with language and with a writing genre that one
enjoys differently” [than digital formats]. Other interviewees also stressed a sense of tran-
quility tied to reading ink-on-paper, like Lucas:
When I read in print … I like to read more calmly. When I read on digital platforms, the truth is
that the speed with which one reads … and also that I read it at work, while I get calls and
work at the same time … It’s not the same as sitting down and devoting one hour and a
half or two to read the print paper calmly.

This perception of a link between newsprint and slower and calmer reading was con-
nected to accessing lengthier and more complex content. Carla, the attorney, noted
that she read “opinion pieces, editorials, and things that are more essay-like” in newspa-
pers. Camile, who is forty-nine years of age, coincided with Carla: “to me it’s more con-
venient to read [the news] on paper. There, I have the stories and the in-depth articles.
Sometimes I’m not tech-savvy, so it’s difficult for me to locate [these stories and articles]
on the cell phone.” In other cases, the connection to slower and calmer reading practices
10 P. J. BOCZKOWSKI ET AL.

was not to tied specific types of content, but to seasons that are not as hectic as others.
Martín, a twenty-year-old undergraduate, said he liked to read the newspaper when he
goes
on vacation. We have a vacation condo in [the resort town of] Villa Gesell and in the past few
years we’ve been going there for a month and a half. I like to buy the newspaper there. I don’t
like to spend so much time on my cell phone, but that’s because I have more free time.

By reading print newspapers, some interviewees experienced a closer relationship with

the news content that shaped their interpretive practices. In the words of Lucas, the attor-
ney, “I digest the news much more … I analyze it more and devote time to read opinion”
pieces. Patricia, the high-school teacher, also noted that “the medium [newsprint] influ-
ences the relationship with the reader and generates a different connection and
different sensations.” However, reading print news does not appear to be necessarily con-
nected to a comprehensive examination of the content since few interviewees said that
they read the whole newspaper. Instead, most of them stated that they only browsed
over the headlines and looked for interesting topics. A fifty-one-year-old medical sales
representative who usually read a print copy during his daily lunch break said that he
“glances at the newspaper. (…) If there is something that interests me, then I read it. Other-
wise, I just read the headlines.” Juan Carlos, a seventy-one-year-old retiree summed this up
as follows:
I skim through the news more than reading the newspaper fully, with the exception of an
article that maybe interests me. Because in reality they’re all about the same, and it’s the
same that was discussed yesterday, and the day before yesterday. Since I listen to the radio
and do so early [in the day], when the newspaper is sold in the morning there are lots of
news that are already in the radio.

Nonreading
The practices of the interviewees who choose not to read print newspapers also centered
heavily on the imbrication of the textual, the material, and the character of everyday life.
For some interviewees it was the physical characteristics of size and weight what impacted
negatively in their news consumption decisions. To Leila, a nineteen-year-old undergradu-
ate student, the “newspaper is heavy (…) and cumbersome.” Alberto, a sixty-two-year-old
consultant, reflected on his transition from reading the newspaper while in public trans-
portation to getting this news on his smartphone during his commute:
Many years ago, when this was not still possible, I enjoyed buying the newspaper to do the
same that I now do with the cell phone: reading the news and entertaining myself during
my commute. You know, carrying it on the train … But it was really uncomfortable, especially
for instance, La Nación, which was big like this [pointing with his hands, since that paper was a
broadsheet at the time], it was a mess reading it. I think Clarín won a lot years ago with the
smaller [tabloid] format, much more manageable. [But] nowadays everything changed since
the main competitor is the cellphone.

To some interviewees, other print media such as magazines seemed more pleasant to the
touch than the newspaper. This difference even occurred with the juxtaposition of an
unfavorable opinion of the Sunday print edition and a favorable opinion of the magazine
that comes with it, as we have seen above. Sabrina, a twenty-one-year-old college student,
 JOURNALISM STUDIES 11

commented that her parents “purchase the newspaper, but I rarely use. Maybe I don’t
know, on Sunday, because it comes with a magazine that I like to read.” Estefania, a
twenty-six-year-old employee at a nonprofit, concurred by stating that “I don’t read the
print newspaper … it gives me the chills, (…) it overwhelms me. I prefer the digital
format … [and] I don’t like to have something enormous in my hands. But I do read the
magazine because it’s smaller.”
The statements by Sabrina and Estefania suggested that some interviewees, even
though they were surrounded by print artifacts, did not use them because they disliked
them as material devices. Julian, who is thirty years of age, reads “the newspaper con-
stantly. Online, obviously, not on paper. Because the paper edition bores me and online
is more dynamic, faster, and obviously it structures [reading] more.” In addition, some
interviewees tackled the ecological dimension of the print paper; something that they
did not associate with books. To Kevin, the print newspaper:
Is too big. It has more news that the amount I’d really consume. That is, I go on the internet and
there are the all headlines there, so I look at the news story I want to read and that’s it. To get
to that story in the print newspaper I have to go through the pages manually … it’s a lot easier
to that on the computer. And even supposing that I read the entire print newspaper from front
to back, I don’t know what I would do with all of that paper afterwards … I don’t want to have
it, it’s not like a book that I do want to keep … also for an ecological reason.

Thus, many interviewees who did not read print newspapers preferred to emphasize the
ease of access, interactivity, variety, and multimedia content that the online news brought
to them.
I think that the internet can integrate multimedia aspects that are absent in the print news-
paper. Then I prefer to consume news online precisely because there is greater quantity
and variety of information. I like that mix. I also like it that it’s easier to read news [that
way], said Sabrina, the college student.

The embodiment of touching the paper and smelling the ink had morphed into the
cleaner and more shiny experience of scrolling news on smartphone screens.

Discussion
In this paper, we have examined the reception of the print newspaper during this period
partly characterized by its strong circulation decline. The first research question centered
on how the practices of reception in the contemporary environment are shaped by the
dynamics of everyday life. Our findings show that the appropriation of this media artifact
is in no small measure shaped by the imbrication of content, materiality, and practice
dynamics that are connected to broader patterns of daily life. Thus, for instance, while
instrumentally pushing print copies into news people’s homes by way of a loyalty pro-
grams that offer discounts in local stores might increase circulation figures, this does
not appear to be correlated with actual reading practices. Conversely, visiting bars,
coffee places, and restaurants for leisure rather than for informational reasons might none-
theless increase newspaper readership. Spatial and temporal dynamics related to city life
during the work week and family rituals during the weekend also appeared to positively
influence interviewees contact with, and enjoyment of, print newspapers. Furthermore,
issues of embodiment were critical in affecting some interviewees’ preference of the
12 P. J. BOCZKOWSKI ET AL.

print newspaper versus its digital counterparts: even when the information content was
similar—if not the literally same—the former elicited a nostalgic emotional experience
that was unmatched by the latter. Conversely, those who did not read print newspapers
derived particular pleasure in the glossy and shiny tactile experience of digital news. More-
over, sociability dynamics also shaped reading print newspapers, both as collective and as
individual practices, and even the fact of being reached by its content as a by-product of
family interaction when not directly reading it. Finally, the experience of a greater tranqui-
lity and depth of reading, that was common among many interviewees, emerges from a
particular textual, material, and social assemblage that goes beyond the news—which is in
many cases literally the same of what is accessed through digital artifacts.
Thus, complementing the people- and media-centric approaches to newspaper reader-
ship—and news consumption more generally—our analysis highlights the role of the
interconnections between textuality, materiality, and the broader character of everyday
life. This builds upon recent scholarship that eschews what borrowing from Couldry
(2012) one might call “media centrism”—most notably by Fortunati, Taipale, and Farinosi
(2015), and Kormelink and Meijer (2019)—and adds a stronger focus on the role of the
larger patterns of daily life that exceed the reception of the print newspaper yet contribute
to shape it.
The second research question centered on the distinct features in which the imbrica-
tion of the textual and the materiality with larger patterns of everyday life takes place
in a national context outside of the Global North. Four aspects of our findings were
partly shaped by the local context. First, the existence of loyalty programs that tie print
newspaper subscription to significant monetary benefits for non-news products and ser-
vices is not common in other markets, and their paradoxical effects on newspaper reading
are quite telling of the limitations of instrumental strategies to overcome this media
sector’s economic crisis.1 Second, the existence of a particularly vibrant urban scene
with strong literary undertones, although not unique to Buenos Aires and other Argentine
towns, is also not necessarily shared in many other countries. The presence of a news rack
at a McDonald’s restaurant is a symbol of this literary urban landscape that might not be
matched in branches of this multinational chain in other parts of the world. Third, the per-
sistence of regular intergenerational family gatherings on Sunday, including the regular
presence even of college students, which positively affected particular newspaper
reading practices, is also a distinctive element of social life in Argentina that also exists
in other countries, but not necessarily all over the world. This shows the extent to
which the same outcome—in this case, variations in Sunday readership—can be
shaped by locally different trends—in this case, the regularity of family gatherings in a col-
lectivist society such as Argentina’s. Finally, Argentines have long had a fairly strong
culture of nostalgia, which can also be seen in the aesthetic experience of newspaper
reception and the importance that the connections of sights and smells have with an
otherwise bygone era.
Our account suggests that, paraphrasing Alexander’s (2010) insight, when it comes to
making sense of why and how some people are still connected to the print newspaper, in
certain ways it is less about communication and more about the experience that emerges
from the imbrication of the textual and the material within the broader dynamics of daily
life. This, in turns, enables the analysis to “move away from dualities such as digital/analog,
material/ immaterial, printed/electronic, or highbrow/lowbrow and toward a view of
 JOURNALISM STUDIES 13

materiality that recognizes fluidity, change, and activity” (Plotnick 2015, 231). Making this
conceptual move invites new questions about materiality not in terms of objects, but in
terms of the processes and conditions under which certain things come to be differen-
tiated and identified as particular kinds of objects endowed with certain constellations
of meaning, value and power (Benzecry and Domínguez Rubio 2018). It highlights the rel-
evance of the reader’s body and its senses and how it mirrors the symbolic, cultural and
social characteristics of the relationships among users, reading devices, and journalistic
content (Fortunati, Taipale, and Farinosi 2015, 22).
This account also has broader implications. Consistent with its information focus, most
of the scholarship on the demise of print newspapers has elaborated on implications
having to do with issues such as a decline in the quality of the democratic process, of a
deterioration of an informed citizenry, a diminished public sphere, a decrease of editorial
value, a lowered set of working conditions, and a loss of reading depth. Complementing all
of these issues, our account raises the scenario of a decline in a particular lived experience
marked by family and city rituals, tactile and nostalgic embodiment, and tranquility and
slow sensemaking. The sights, smells, and touch of ink on paper are window into a peculiar
way of life that has marked the past couple of centuries and that appears to be in as much
a crisis as it is the media artifact that was integral to its existence.

Note
1. La Nación developed its Readers’ Club program in 1990. It was limited to offering some dis-
counts sporadically and mainly under the category of entertainment. The name was changed
to Club La Nación in 2001, and four years later the Club La Nación card was launched, and sub-
scribers to magazines of the media group were also included within the beneficiaries. Clarín
launched its loyalty program card in 2010. With the subscription, clients receive the newspaper
at home and enjoy benefits and savings in different industries, in more than 1400 brands and
5000 points of purchase, according to their website information. According to Ivaldi and Malta-
gliatti (2015), Club La Nación has 750,000, and Clarín 365 has 800,000 members.

Acknowledgements
We thank the editor, and reviewers for helping us develop this article through challenging and pro-
ductive questions, suggestions and criticisms, and Mike Ananny, Chris Anderson, Keren Tenenboim-
Weinblatt, and Silvio Waisbord for the advice with the overall project. An earlier versions of the
manuscript was presented at the ICA 2019 preconference on “Digital Journalism in Latin America”.
Last but not least, we wholeheartedly thank the research assistants whose collaboration was essen-
tial for this project: Victoria Andelsman, Tomás Bombau, Sofía Carcavallo, Paloma Etenberg, Rodrigo
Gil Buetto, Camila Giuliano, Belén Guigue, Silvana Leiva, Inés Lovisolo, Mora Matassi, Mattia Panza,
Jeanette Rodríguez, Celeste Wagner, and Marina Weinstein.

Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Funding
This project was in part made possible by a grant to the first author from the Robert and Kaye Hiatt
Fund for Research on Media, Technology, and Society at Northwestern University.
14 P. J. BOCZKOWSKI ET AL.

ORCID
Pablo J. Boczkowski http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9446-8303
Eugenia Mitchelstein http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7355-8740

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