The History of Paper and Public Space INTRODUCTION

This article introduces a group of articles on the history of paper and issues of scarcity in the history of newspapers and news media generally. The articles discussed share a concern with the parallels between paper scarcities in newspaper history and spectrum scarcities in broadcast history. This introductory essay comments on the similarities and differences between the two kinds of scarcity and comments more broadly on the rise and fall of bottlenecks in media systems, paying attention both to how scholars have discussed materialities of media communication and how legacy news media in the digital era have encountered a new competitive landscape.