Stands... of newspapers? Sameness and adaptation in cityscapes

Abstract

With the movements of the streets and the constant socio-technical transformations, the newsstands conventionally used to commercialize printed titles were redimensioned amidst the urgent temporal and social instabilities in the possible relationships of each place. Paying attention to the adaptability of the newsstands due to the urban contexts, this article focuses on the newsstands we have come across in exploratory journeys in cities of seven states of Brazil in order to reflect on “the lives of the newsstands” and think them as communicational environments that admit different formats due to the crossings with the spaces that constitute them and taking them as constituent agents of the spaces.

Keywords Stands; Newspaper; Magazine; Communicational ambiences; Instabilities

Resumo

Com os movimentos das ruas e as constantes transformações sociotécnicas, as bancas convencionadas para comercialização de títulos impressos se redimensionaram em meio às instabilidades temporais e sociais urgentes nas relações possíveis em cada lugar. Com atenção à adaptabilidade das bancas em razão dos contextos urbanos, este trabalho se debruça sobre as bancas com as quais nos deparamos em percursos exploratórios em cidades de sete estados brasileiros para, com elas, refletir sobre “as vidas das bancas” e pensá>-las como ambiências comunicacionais que admitem diferentes formatações em razão dos atravessamentos com os espaços que as constituem e tomando-as como agentes constituidoras dos espaços.

Palavras-chave Bancas; Jornal; Revista; Ambiências comunicacionais; Instabilidades

Resumen

Con el movimiento de las calles y las constantes transformaciones sociotécnicas, los quioscos hechos para la venta de títulos impresos fueron redimensionados en medio de las inestabilidades temporales y sociales de las relaciones posibles en cada lugar. Con atención a la adaptabilidad de los quioscos debido a los contextos urbanos, este trabajo se centra en los que encontramos en caminos exploratorios en ciudades de siete estados brasileños para, con ellos, reflexionar sobre “la vida de los quioscos” y pensarlos como ambientes comunicacionales que admiten diferentes formatos debido a los cruces con los espacios que los constituyen y tomándolos como agentes constituyentes de los espacios.

Palabras clave Quioscos; Periódico; Revista; Ambientes comunicacionales; Inestabilidades

Introduction

In one of the few major studies dedicated to newsstands, South African researcher Mehita Iqani (2012) toured the streets of London, England, as part of her ethnographic work. For Iqani, newsstands are “retail spaces” and a “semiotic spectacle”, given the profusion of information and stimuli they present. At first glance, walking through the streets of a Brazilian big city confirms Iqani’s observation: the stalls are elements of appeal amid the flow of people and signs that appear there. On any given afternoon, it’s possible to wander through busy streets, drink coffee and/or sugarcane juice, talk to street vendors, observe people with different rhythms, clothes, bodies, and presences, be crossed by advertisements of different qualities, listen to music and radio announcements, store announcers, preachers, among others. Along the way, you can see the structures, usually metal, of what are known as ‘newsstands’, which are usually full of a variety of products, organized in such a way that they look like a “carnival of things”.

However, this scene offers a significant and decisive contrast with the characterization made by Mehita Iqani. For her, the semiotic spectacularity of newsstands was linked to the diversity of printed products, especially magazines, which predominated among other objects on sale. Contrary to what Iqani’s (2012) ethnography recorded, walking through the center of a Brazilian city shows that newsstands are less and less “newspaper” or “magazine”. On any given day, in the midst of the urban flow, you notice that the stalls can offer “everything”, such as perfumes, cosmetics, key rings, handouts, raincoats, cell phone covers, lottery tickets, books, flowers, sticker albums, foodstuffs and the most varied objects, as well as a variety of services (key copies, document laminating, photocopying, etc.). Many of them don’t carry any product even similar to a magazine or newspaper.

Investigating newsstands a few years before Iqani, Brazilian researcher Cláudia Fonseca (2008, p. 182) had already noticed the dynamics of transformation that positioned them as a “memory of a past”. Fonseca (2008) investigated the stalls in the so-called “hypercenter” of Belo Horizonte and observed that they experienced an interesting temporal dynamic. On the one hand, the newsstands indicate the decline of certain processes in the publishing industry, strongly linked to print, which has accelerated over the years, and on the other hand, they have accentuated their role as “one of the main gateways to news in the life of the city”¹.

In this sense, this article is part of an exploratory study on newsstands, of an indicative nature (BRAGA, 2008) and without totalizing pretensions, in view of its temporal complexity. At first, this investigation involved recording stalls as they are in some Brazilian cities, inspired by Fonseca’s methodology, which proposes “letting yourself be affected by the buzz of the streets and recording the experience in a field notebook and with a camera” (2008, p. 81). This exploratory record included stalls in the cities of São Luís, in Maranhão; Recife, in Pernambuco; Salvador, in Bahia; Iguatu and Fortaleza, in Ceará; Belo Horizonte, Itabira, Capitólio, Conselheiro Lafaiete, Nova Lima, Ouro Preto and Contagem, in Minas Gerais; João Pessoa, in Paraíba; and in the capital of São Paulo. These cities and the stalls photographed were not chosen based on a specific criterion, but presented themselves to the investigation as they were present in the daily routes possible for the researchers² involved in this observation exercise (MACEDO; SOUZA; GABRIELLA; PIMENTEL, 2023), which took place during the Covid-19 pandemic, in 2021 and 2022. From the photos and, especially, from observing the newsstands in these cities, one develops the perception that they are like a kind of “everyday catastrophe”, since they present an ongoing process, in which they disappear as “newspaper” or “magazine” stores and already respond to a new state of affairs, presenting themselves on the urban scene sometimes as convenience stores, “1.99” stores, cell phone cover stores and a myriad of possible products.

The reflection developed here therefore sets out to characterize the temporal complexity of the stalls, based on two complementary movements. Firstly, we present some images and observations of some of the stalls in the cities listed that we came across during our exploratory journeys. This contact with “the lives of the newsstands”, in turn, includes a review of the sparse literature on them, especially the works of Fonseca (2008), Iqani (2012) and Chagas (2013). In general, it seems to us that there is something recognizable in different cities that goes by the name of “banca”, even though each one is unique. In this sense, for us, the rigidity of the physical structure of newsstands, their apparent perpetuity, and their national recognition contrast with their strong adaptability, making them a “space in movement”, relatively unstable, plural and shifting communicational environments. In their survival, newsstands are points of dialogue with their surroundings, which should be understood as a local landscape, circumscribed, and located in the midst of urban diversity.

As we walked along the streets paying attention to the stalls, we used photography as a way of textualizing the experience and as a way of recording the surfaces and crossings that emerged in our wanderings. The stalls became an anchor for our routes because, as Fonseca (2008, p. 125) observes, they establish “possibilities for interrupting the continuous flow of passers-by on the sidewalk”. The stalls offer themselves as stopping points, a place to escape the acceleration, a detour from the invitation to pause, consume and experience (with the stall itself and, often, with the space that surrounds it). In this sense, the exploratory journeys made in the different cities reveal the stalls as “semiotic spectacles” (as named by Iqani, 2012), which are both recognizable and very different from each other.

Of the cities covered in the research, only Fortaleza does not have municipal regulations that typify stalls and set parameters for commercial activity. In all cases, however, there is a pulsating creative range in the interactions experienced on public roads that displace the stalls from the rigid letters of the legal frameworks. For this reason, we have chosen to look at the surfaces of the surroundings in which the stalls are located (and in which they are situated) in order to take note of the tensions and negotiations of meanings in the urban space in which the stalls are made as communicational environments, amidst the shifting terrain of different spatialities (HAESBAERT, 2014; INGOLD, 2015; 2018; SANTOS, 2001).

To look at “surfaces”, in dialogue with Fonseca (2008, p. 81), is to admit the perenniality in which newsstands and spaces are (re)constituted in the face of the constant change of agents in urban flux, who, in turn, (re)order the falling meanings of people, places and things. At the same time, looking at surfaces also forces us to recognize that the same metal structure can become a different newsstand from one day to the next, from morning to night, or even on the same day and in the same situation for different people and groups when they mobilize particular experiences and expectations. In other words, observing and recording newsstands in loco allows us to reach what Milton Santos (2001) characterizes as the horizontal axis of spatial relations, in which the articulations with the surroundings and “local” experiences stand out, which are also constituted in dialogue with the tensions and crossings of vertical power of a broader nature (such as the conformations of the publishing industry, for example).

From this perspective, newsstands can be seen as “in transit”, in “crisis” or even, as we said, as “everyday catastrophes”. Each of these terms refers to specific relations of meaning and produces peculiar images for the relations in which the stalls are configured and in which they operate. Given the varied implications of the terms, as developed by Koselleck (1999), Bertoll, Maia, Valle and Manna (2020), Leal, Carvalho, Jácome and Costa (2021), among others, we particularly highlight their temporal dynamics. “Crisis” and “catastrophe”, for example, make explicit temporalities and cultural experiences that call into question both linear perspectives and presentist visions. A moment of crisis is not just an event in the present, but a situation in which relations with the past and possibilities for the future become entangled as a result of tensions experienced as imprecise or uncertain. In a catastrophe, a state of affairs, a way of being, is disrupted, requiring another reorganization of life, in the present, but also in its articulations with what has happened and with the necessary reconfigurations with the expectations of what is to come.

The image of a “daily catastrophe” is therefore an ongoing process which, although it has vertical aspects, acquires particular local features due to its horizontal relations. A horizontal approach to the stalls, if based on presence, expands the present, so that the contemporaneity of temporalities can be glimpsed, in line with what Agamben (2021) says. As the Italian philosopher observes, in the wake of Nietzsche’s untimely considerations,

truly belongs to his time, he is truly contemporary who does not coincide perfectly with it or conform to its demands and is therefore, in this sense, out of date; but precisely for this reason, precisely through this separation and this anachronism, he is able, more than others, to perceive and apprehend his time

(Agamben, 2021, p. 22).

From this perspective, we reflect on the temporal dynamics that make newsstands a contemporary phenomenon, at once present, active, anachronistic, and outdated. It is not a question, then, of diagnosing the death (already or in progress) of the stalls, nor of projecting their future from them, but rather of observing the concrete responses they offer in the face of ongoing transformations and their configurations of what “already was”, what “already is” and what it indicates that will be.

More than a decade after Fonseca’s (2008) and Iqani’s (2012) research, newsstands remain in the urban landscape of big cities, reinventing themselves as retail stores, adapting to their surroundings, while at the same time becoming rarer in neighborhoods and smaller towns. In this sense, newsstands materialize in themselves the transformations involving traditional, printed media in the face of the growth of digital cultures, and the localized dynamics that are part of city life. They are temporally complex daily presences, since they are signs of a past and also particularly sensitive to the fashions and cultural and climatic seasonalities that capture (perhaps even predicting) the peculiarities of the flows in which they are inserted.

The stall’s shows

Walking through the center of Fortaleza, it’s common to come across a group of stalls in Praça do Ferreira. Considered to be the heart of commerce in the capital of Ceará and the stage for historical plots involving the constitution of Alencar’s identities, the square is home to different stalls and is a crossing point for different agents who get tangled up in the flow of purchases, sales, and political life possible there. There we find the ‘Banca do Maciel’, which sells newspapers, magazines, and books by Dostoyevsky and about Lula, mobilizing its clientele. In the square, with a priority on sweets and drinks and no printed publications, there is also the ‘Banca Principal’, which hides the few magazines amidst the sea of sweets; the same goes for the neighbouring stall, called ‘Ler é Viver’ (Reading is Living), which, in the absence of newspapers and magazines, specializes in selling stickers and albums for collectors. The specialized trade uniquely adorns the stalls in Praça do Ferreira and the use of the shade trees as a resting place for homeless people, street vendors and shoppers temporarily escaping from the sun brings them together as a stopping point.

Figure 1
Stalls at Praça do Ferreira in Fortaleza/CE

In the center of São Luís, near Rua Grande, the city’s commercial district, we find stalls on the sidewalks in front of the two large state schools in the area, the Instituto Estadual de Educação do Maranhão - IEMA and the Liceu. These two stalls have no identification and have very distinct identities. The one closest to the Liceu still sells magazines and printed publications, but they are already competing with other products, such as dishcloths and various utilities. The one closest to IEMA, on the other hand, is like a convenience store, where magazines clearly take up much less space.

Figure 2
Stalls in the center of São Luís/MA

The coexistence of printed publications and other products can also be seen at newsstands in the Monte Castelo, Cohab and São Francisco neighborhoods (shown respectively in the images below), in the capital of Maranhão. Unlike the stalls in the city center, these are identified by signs and maintain a certain standardization.

Figure 3
Stalls in neighborhoods of São Luís/MA

Rua Carijós, in the center of Belo Horizonte, is one of the links to Praça Sete, a landmark in the region, and to Av. Paraná, the bus corridor of the city’s BRT system. In the two blocks that follow Praça Sete, in the direction of Av. Paraná, there are three stalls very different from each other. The first, near the corner of Rua São Paulo and opposite a branch of Lojas Americanas, offers a myriad of products, from cell phone covers to slippers, from stuffed animals to key rings and water, as well as services such as xeroxing. Closer to the corner of Rua Curitiba, the second is basically a cell phone accessory store complemented by a few other products, such as neck pillows and soccer balls for children. The third, in the middle of the block between Rua Curitiba and Av. Paraná, is opposite a large Marisa store and resembles a combination of a convenience store and a “1.99” store, given the diversity of products on offer.

Figure 4
Stalls at Praça Sete in Belo Horizonte/MG

As we walk along Avenida do Contorno, in the Floresta neighborhood of Belo Horizonte, the newsstands are on the sidewalks amid the frenzy of the neighborhood’s shopping center. There we find the ‘Banca do Contorno’ and the ‘Banca São Vicente’, both of which sells newspapers, especially the Super - a local newspaper from the capital of Minas Gerais. The latter, in particular, offers a vast collection of journalistic productions with printed titles from Folha de S. Paulo and O Globo. However, these are not the main items on sale, nor do they occupy prime space in the shop windows, which, in turn, are full of fanny packs, sweets, tobacconists’ items, printed articles about soccer, handouts, masks, among others.

Figure 5
Stalls on Avenida Contorno, in Floresta, Belo Horizonte/MG

In the Palmares neighborhood, located about 6 kilometers from the center of Belo Horizonte, in a northeasterly direction, there is a single stall on one of the main streets in the area, opposite a restaurant and next to a bakery and the entrance to a public park. As well as selling imported items such as toys, cell phone covers and accessories, flip-flops, among others, this stall also provides a quick printing service and technical assistance for cell phones.

Figure 6
Palmares stall in Belo Horizonte/MG

If in big cities, stalls present themselves as stores selling a variety of products, the same is true in smaller towns. In Iguatu, Ceará, the city’s two newsstands belong to the same owner and are in the city center. Both have magazines in their windows, but offer a much broader menu of products and services, such as twine, sweets, lottery games, cigarettes and other items.

Figure 7
Stalls in the center of Iguatu/CE

In the cities of Nova Lima and Contagem, in the metropolitan region of Belo Horizonte, the situation is not so different. In the center of Nova Lima, there is a stall in Praça do Mineiro, near a busy bus stop. Those heading to catch public transport eventually pause there; even the bus drivers, waiting for the next bus to leave. At first glance, it seems to have become, in practice, a little shop selling a variety of products, such as sunglasses, caps, bags, watches, board games, key rings, water and soft drinks stored in a minibar. However, when you get closer, you can see that inside there are magazines - somewhat hidden. Apart from the few magazines, perhaps the only products reminiscent of the old stalls are a few books, various stickers, and soccer posters for sale. There is a chain preventing unauthorized entry into the establishment, which makes it difficult for the reader to get closer to the printed products, which are far away from the store windows.

Figure 8
Newsstand in Nova Lima/MG

In Contagem, also in the center, we found two newsstands, one in front of a municipal school and near a supermarket, and the other near the old Forum, a cab rank and in the middle of a variety of stores and services. Both keep magazines on their shelves, but they compete with different products. The first is occupied by sweets and treats, while the second has a very varied product mix that includes cigarettes and xerox services.

Figure 9
Stalls in Contagem/MG

In Itabira, a city in Minas Gerais located in the Iron Quadrangle, in the central region of the state, we find a stall called ‘Joelbra’, positioned between the corners of Av. João Pinheiro and Rua São José - one of the city’s main thoroughfares - which functions more like a utility shop where you can find everything from children’s toys to a mosquito- killing racket. There’s everything, even newspapers and magazines.

Figure 10
Newsstand in Itabira/MG

In the historical city of Ouro Preto, there are no magazine stands, at least not like the ones we’ve seen in other cities. On Rua São José, the main commercial thoroughfare, however, there is a store that is called a newsstand by the owners and the local population and is primarily dedicated to selling books, keeping a scarce collection of newspapers and magazines.

Figure 11
Stall on Rua São José in Ouro Preto/MG

This little tour of stalls in different Brazilian cities and states brings us face to face with an unavoidable tension between sameness and uniqueness. At first, regardless of the place, city or state, there is something that is translocally recognizable as a stall. Whether it’s the standardization of their structure, or the way they are inserted into the streets, squares, and avenues: they are identifiable beyond their peculiarities. It is as if the association between the sign “banca” and its referent is something peaceful, naturalized and relatively stable. However, the example of Ouro Preto, where a store that looks like a bookshop is recognized as a newsstand, suggests more instability and imprecision in this supposed common sense. There is a local understanding that associates “stall” with a point of sale for printed products and not with a physical structure installed on the sidewalks. This perception, in turn, is contradicted by what newsstands in other cities actually sell, which, as we’ve said, are increasingly more about ‘convenience’ than ‘newspapers and magazines’. This tension between similarity and singularity, however, is perhaps one more element of the crossings that make up newsstands today.

Spaces at crossroads

According to Tejedo-Romero and Araujo (2018), interest in transparency increased from the 1990s onwards, when international organizations, aiming to reduce corruption and abuses of power, began to recommend that governments be more transparent and use practices. Newsstands don’t receive much attention in Communication studies, but the research already shows some diversity between them. Silva, Figueiredo and Santos (2015), for example, believe that newsstands are a “kind” of space which, in their view, has the characteristic of immutability and “a relatively passive role in the dynamics of urban space” (2015, p. 92). This view is contradicted by Chagas (2013, p. 51), who, considering the legal regulations surrounding them, notes that the stalls “are therefore a space regulated by the public authorities and operated by private initiative, on a precarious basis”. Despite the existence of rigid regulatory frameworks in some cities, this does not imply stability, passivity, or inertia. For Chagas (2013, p. 51), taking the city of Rio de Janeiro as a reference, “newsstands not only modernize over the following years, but [...] face the same setbacks as other sectors when successive political transformations take place in the city”.

It’s interesting to note that, at the time of his study, Viktor Chagas addressed newsstands as an important part of the publishing market. For him, newsstands act as spaces for disputes over memory and visibility as they operate as information disseminators at high traffic points in cities and, in this respect, “they are at the same time the opposite end of the production sector and the main interface between journalist and reader in the print media” (2013, p. 25). In this sense, Chagas recognizes the intervening role of the newsstand in the space in which it is positioned and also admits that it is modulated and transformed according to the interests of the newsstand owners and the tensions of the publishing market - to the detriment of socio-spatial relations.

The same is true of Mehita Iqani (2012) in her reflections based on her ethnography in London. The very understanding of newsstands as a device and a semiotic “spectacle” derives from the omnipresence of magazines and various publications, which fill these “retail spaces” with information and appeals. For Iqani (2012, p.61), newsstands, as retail stores, “[...] operate as stages on which the visual consumption of the spectacle of merchandise takes place”. In this sense, newsstands are important elements of the city’s flânerie and are home to other forms of interaction, with the targeted consumer and with what she calls free-readers, i.e. people who linger at newsstands reading magazines, even briefly, with no intention of buying them. Faced with the tension between sameness and uniqueness present in each newsstand, however, Iqani tends towards the former, to the point of associating these “retail spaces” with deterritorialization and the “non-places” identified by Marc Augé. She says:

Participant observation of newsstands highlighted this condition of ‘placelessness’, akin to a geography of “non-places” in “supermodernity” (Augé, 1995). Although each newsstand visited was locally located and in some ways unique, the enduring similarities of each space (mostnotably the magazine titles on the shelves) eroded any solid sense of placement and social context and highlighted instead how the aesthetics of global capitalism are reproduced in the retail setting

(IQANI, 2012, p.64, emphasis added).

It’s interesting to note that Iqani, on the one hand, recognizes that each newsstand is, in a way, unique, but opts for the pole of sameness, of similarity, basically because of the recurrence of magazines and publications sold. Repetition, then, is a function of the publishing market’s ways of being, which make each stall indistinguishable by homogenizing its products. What happens, then, when this publishing market becomes increasingly digital rather than printed, when newsstands are no longer “standardized” by the same products? Some clues are given by Iqani herself (2012, p. 66), who notes that, at the time of her research, magazines and printed publications were accompanied by a variety of products, almost all of which were cheap and “easy to buy”. With this appeal of colors, smells, textures and shapes, the stalls are, in her view, something that refer to chaos and especially privilege appearance, since as “retail spaces they prioritize the presence, both material and mediated, of certain subjects and objects, and literally provide well-lit, extremely visible and accessible spaces for the display of products” (IQANI, 2012, p. 77-78).

Cláudia Fonseca (2008), on the other hand, goes in the opposite direction to Iqani and emphasizes the uniqueness of the stalls in relation to the unstable contexts of the streets and the people with whom they interact. This is because “by establishing itself as a communicational ambience in the urban landscape, it makes an articulation between current time and urban space happen in a peculiar way”, explains Fonseca (2008, p. 126). With this, she admits that different agents intersect in the city and, together, they give marks that prevent the homogenization of spaces, because “they exert an influence on their surroundings, reduce fragmentation, crossing the various meanings that are produced in the daily life of places” (FONSECA, 2008, p. 89). In Fonseca’s (2008) incursions into the center of Belo Horizonte, she observes that the stalls and the city weave convergent relationships: the stall is constitutive and constituted by the dynamics of the city. Thus, different stalls are possible because of different cities that are jointly elaborated in social practices that support them and make them possible.

What’s more, the city space itself is fractured, harboring differences, peculiarities, and specific flows. For Fonseca, “the urban space in which the stalls are located is fragmented, there is no line that leads to a certain destination for conversations started at a point” (2008, p. 130) and, therefore, the stalls are heterogeneous and shifting. It’s no coincidence that legal regulations don’t close off the lives of the stalls which, in the rhythms of interactions and transitory fragmentations of urban space, harbor other movements, unforeseen in the letter of the law. Fonseca deepens this reflection by arguing that ambiences are “expressions of the tension between everyday uses and the regulations and constraints that govern spaces” (2008, p. 81). This dispute, between regulation and adaptability, between, on the one hand, the directions of spaces guided by hegemonic institutions and agents; and, on the other, the instabilities arising from the interactions practiced by different agents positioned in specific flows, transits, and locations, requires each stall to offer a peculiar and unique response, even if it is shaky and provisional.

Final Considerations

In the midst of the wide range of crossings and compositions of meanings that permeate walking the streets of urban centers, we took the stalls as “attractors” in the sense proposed by Fonseca (2008, p. 89), in which they anchor and guide our gazes and our steps in the midst of the transience of urban space. The gesture of taking them as an attractor allowed us to relate to the stalls - in general - and to each one of them, observing the tensions between homogenizations and singularizations, making it possible to understand the stalls as permanent and also as changing spaces.

By looking at them in relation to their contexts and recognizing the unstable dynamics with which they interact, it’s fair to note that newsstands have something of the same, which says less about a fixed element that is indifferent to cities, but rather about their broader history, constituted in close relation to the cultures of print, the processes that involve their institutionalization in social life. They are not integrated into the space as an immutable given: they are configured and agents in the concrete relationships of their surroundings, a fragment of the urban fabric in which they are situated and of which they are situants.

By proposing that the stalls’ belonging to the space is not a guaranteed fact, Fonseca (2008) recognizes that the meanings attributed to them and the social uses that involve them are configurations that position them as an object of “dispute” - therefore unstable and transitory in the face of different interests and variable agencies in which meanings can be modulated. The instability of the meanings and relationships constituted with the stalls highlight the different weaves created as a result of the movements made by different agents. By positioning themselves in an active way in the communication processes of an urban center, the peculiarity of the stalls creates communicational ambiences in potency, to the extent that they enter “into the movements that give life and meaning to places, and also into the movements that undo them soon after” (FONSECA, 2008, p. 127).

By showing that a stall creates communicational ambiences, we recognize, as Fonseca (2008, p. 129) says, that they tension “the space-time relationships that take place in the city”. We therefore find very particular stalls that tell us as much about their recurrence, their sameness, as, in the opposite direction, they reiterate the creative force of the shifting terrain of urban space, in which different agents intersect and negotiate meanings about people, things and places. Different stalls are possible because they exist in peculiar spaces and, with them, they come to life by rising in heterogeneities that tell us about the flows, encounters, sharing and displacements that are possible in a certain place. From this perspective, the adaptability of the newsstand to its surroundings becomes the condition for its survival, in the face of the accelerated process of disappearance of what would be its “products par excellence”, newspapers and magazines. Facing the end of the world on a daily basis and still being named after a past that is becoming more and more distant, newsstands are already glimpsing a future after the catastrophe; today, in the present, they present what they paradoxically no longer are, have already become and perhaps will become.

• 1
  All the quotes originally written in Portuguese have been freely translated.
• 2
  Researchers Alexandre Gouveia, Felipe Borges, Felipe Gonzaga, Francielle de Souza, Igor Lage, Igor Luis, Letticia Gabriela, Luciana Amormino, Maurício Vieira Filho, Paulo Vitor Souza, Pedro Bernardo, Poliana Sales, Prussiana Fernandes, Rafael Andrade, Tess Chamusca and Thiago Pimentel, as well as the authors of this article, contributed to the observation.

Funding

• The research that underpins this publication is supported by the Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico – CNPq.

Data availability

Data supporting the results of this study are available upon request from the authors.

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Edited by

• Editor: Maria Ataide Malcher
  Editorial assistant: Aluzimara Nogueira Diniz, Julia Quemel Matta, Suelen Miyuki A. Guedes e Weverton Raiol

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  08 Dec 2023
• Date of issue
  2023

History

• Received
  27 Oct 2022
• Accepted
  25 Oct 2023