10 March 2020 marked what may retrospectively be called the end of an era: it was the last day before the World Health Organisation officially declared the global pandemic that continues to reshape our world in critical ways. As the restrictions and lockdowns came into effect worldwide, the ‘Drafts of History’ project has created a publicly sourced archive of that particular moment, articulated and comprehended through newspapers of a single day. The project collected physical/paper copies of 10th March papers from around the world to create a snapshot of the world in newspapers, and at the same time a record of newspapers as printed artefacts in our tumultuous world.

Newspapers – in words made famous by The Washington Post in the 1940s – form the ‘first rough draft of history’. Newspapers are also a bundle of contradictions, mayflies of the print world – short-lived, cheap, ubiquitous, and unreliable documents that are both instruments and recipients of a wide variety of use/abuse. Moving from drafts, advertisements, stories, and news to rags, raddi, wrappers, and pulp, in a matter of days, the printed newspaper has a particularly complex existence as a temporal, political, informational, and physical artefact. Thousands of newspapers around the world have ceased to operate over the last decade, and thousands more are on the brink of closure as ways of reporting and transmitting information change. Moreover, it is evident that we are at a juncture where not only the viability of the newspaper as a tangible document is under question, but when the free press as an institution is itself under sustained attack. As a myriad small and local newspapers across the world continue to teeter on the edge, we initiated the Drafts of history project to explore the complex, contradictory, deeply contested, and truly multifarious global history of the printed newspaper.

Over a year of uncertainties and disruptions, we have received more than a thousand newspapers from over ninety countries so far (with newspapers still on the way from several more) – thanks to our intrepid contributors who have persevered through postal purgatories, lost packages, and multiple return-to-sender situations due to the ongoing disruptions. The Drafts of history project is now ready to unveil the snapshot of a critical moment, seen through newspapers from around the world.