Staying Cool: The Impact of Air Conditioning on News Work and the Modern Newsroom

Along with the telephone and the car, the typewriter and other more "mundane" or otherwise unheralded background media technologies, air conditioning (AC) helped to develop modern American newspaper buildings and their newsrooms into the institutions they are today. AC was an invisible tool that was nonetheless felt—literally—when it was there and noted when it was not, as the century wore on and journalism developed into a more white-collar occupation. This article explores AC as a "blacked-boxed" technology using spatial theory, actor-network theory and a material sensibility to make manifest, in specific ways, the physical world of the air-conditioned newsroom.