Michael Stamm

Michael Stamm is a political and cultural historian, and his research focuses on two primary topics: the political economy of news and journalism, and the consideration of “new media” in historical perspective. His explorations of these subjects have resulted in published scholarship on the relationship between radio sound and printed text in the 1930s, media reform campaigns in the 1960s and 1970s, the intellectual history of communication theory, and religious broadcasting.

As a faculty member with a joint appointment in the Department of History and the School of Journalism, Stamm teaches a variety of graduate and undergraduate courses on post-Reconstruction United States history, as well as more specialized courses on media and journalism history.

Stamm's book, Sound Business: Newspapers, Radio, and the Politics of New Media (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), traces how American newspapers have responded to competition from “new media,” which in the few decades after 1920 meant radio broadcasting. Confronted by a new aural medium that could be used to distribute both information and paid advertising, many newspaper publishers began broadcasting as a way to meet this new competition directly. Papers around the country, from large metropolitan dailies to smaller local papers, established radio stations, in the process creating a new type of media corporation with a public presence in multiple media. Concern about the influence of these new multimedia corporations was widespread, as they seemed to critics to be not manifestations of strategic decisions by firms in the media business but instead institutions that could attain too much power to shape public discourse and stifle the circulation of diverse perspectives through the mass media. The outcome of the struggles between corporations, policymakers, and critics over how to regulate these new kinds of media businesses ultimately decided who would have the power to shape the emerging public sphere that included radio alongside newspapers, and who would control the institutions undergirding American society and politics.

Much of his training and previous research is in United States history, but his two current projects are international in scope. Stamm's ongoing major research project is a history of the daily newspaper as a product of industrial capitalism, and in 2012-2013 he is writing a book on the subject as the Fulbright Visiting Research Chair in Public Policy at McGill University in Montreal. Tentatively titled The Metropolitan Newspaper in a Global Economy, the book connects two histories of the past century: the evolution of the American metropolitan newspaper as an industrial commodity, and the creation of the trade policies undergirding the modern global economy. The project balances a global history of newsprint production with a specific narrative focus on the Chicago Tribune, which began Canadian papermaking operations after 1913 when the United States government lifted the duty on newsprint produced in Canada. Favorable tariff policy gave the Tribune Company access to cheap newsprint, which helped the Tribune to become one of the most influential daily newspapers in the United States, and it also allowed the parent company to establish the New York Daily News, which became the highest circulating newspaper in the country. The duty free American importation of newsprint in turn spurred the development of one of Canada’s most important industries and transformed the global market for newsprint and paper. This analysis will offer a new approach to journalism history and the study of North American relations, and it is based on original archival research in American and Canadian sources, including a significant collection opened to researchers for the first time in 2011. His other ongoing project is an essay on the political economy of news production in Great Britain and the United States from 1920-1945 for an edited collection under contract with Oxford University Press.