Deadline – Special Mention 2015

Will Steacy

Deadline

b.frank books • Philadelphia, 2015 • Designed by Bonnie Briant • willsteacy.com

Will Steacy’s Deadline is a newspaper about a newspaper: the Philadelphia Inquirer,where he spent five years photographing the newsroom, employees, and printing plant. Thanks to the Internet, most newspaper staffs are a fraction of what they once were. The Inquirer is no exception, and Deadline chronicles its history—with texts by current and former staff, and archival photographs alongside Steacy’s own—through to its very uncertain future; the final pages see the formerly prominent newspaper moved into a much smaller office. For Steacy, who comes from a family of newspapermen, this story is personal—his father was an editor at the Inquirer for nearly thirty years, till he was laid off while Steacy was working on this project.The materials,design,and printing quality of his son’s contribution are all in line with family tradition (it was even printed at the Inquirer’s own press), but the focus has been turned inward.As Christoph Wiesner comments, “it serves both as a history of the journalism sector and a work of subtexts, revealing a process of deconstruction or mise en abyme.” Deadline is less a case study than it is a eulogy.