I was asked to nominate a book for TIME’s Best Photobooks of the Year 2015 list. So I chose a newspaper.

Will Steacy‘s Deadline is an absolute cracker. One for the working man.

I was proud to nominate Deadline because is brings attention to, as Steacy describes, “the silent army, the gears of the working press, the behind-the-scene workers whose eyes, ears and hands touch a story before it goes live/printed and after the reporter hits send.”

Here’s what I wrote:

Appropriate design and layout are central to a photobook. A newspaper format was the obvious choice for Deadline, Will Steacy’s homage to, an examination of, a downsizing Philadlephia Inquirer. 

But after making the obvious choice, Steacy had a long way to go and a high standard to meet. Deadline is a workers’ history of a paper that in the eighties was known as the “Pulitzer Machine.” 

Fanatical in its view of both the newsroom and the printing presses, Deadline honors the labor of the copyboys, the reporters, the inkers and the editors equally. Decorated journalists reflect back on the Inquirer’s “Golden Age” and Steacy’s dad reflects on generations of their family working in newspapers. In five sections, the amount of research, fact-checking, phone-calls, line-editing and captioning in Deadline is astounding. A collaborative and self-reflective cousin of the newspaper format it references and reveres. Unrepeatable. Unbeatable.

Steacy can breathe easier, now, after completing the epic project.

“This, for me, was an initiation into my family’s newspaperman club and as close as I will get to calling myself a sixth generation newspaper man.”

From where I stand, Steacy looks like a newspaper man. You?

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