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.

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