From Alan Rusbridger’s piece commemorating the paper’s milestone:
"In our times news is as saleable and merchantable a
commodity as soap … The world is
shrinking. Space is every day being bridged …
Physical boundaries are disappearing; moral boundaries must speedily
follow suit … What a change for the world! What a chance for the
newspaper!"[It is] such a friendly thing … that quite an appreciable number of American
citizens should be interested in the life and development of a single
English newspaper."
He’s quoting CP Scott, of course, who was writing about the advent of the wireless telegraph in 1921. I wonder how many pamphleteers – bloggers of their day – were predicting the death of newspapers then?
* and a footnote about how other things come around again and again:
Talking about the wireless telegraph, do you think there might have been a health scare surrounding it – just as we saw in that bobbins Panorama report about Wifi recently? This, from 1880:
"George Beard, the founder of the diagnosis of neurasthenia, ascribed
the cause of this disorder to “wireless telegraphy, science, steam
power, newspapers and the education of women; in other words modern
civilisation.”
Found in the BMJ: Modern worries, new technology and medicine — new technologies mean new health complaints.
That is all.
Another historic perspective: have you noticed how the century-old editions of Guardian look like an RSS feed aggregator page?
cf my post at:
http://www.charliebeckett.org/?p=173
Hooray! I’ve also been having a 50,000 celebration as my blog has recently had it’s 50,000th visitor. Quite a long way to go before 50,000 post though … how about you?!