I’m going to quibble with Mattingly again. He’s so close to right in many areas that his errors make me itchy. (I don’t bother to quibble with demons who are intentionally wrong about everything.)
In this piece about journalism he gets the post-1990 action powerfully right. Cable soap opera and web are pulling toward the single-niche approach. Subscription media like Substack take it farther. He pleads for a return to the old honest branding, totally abandoning the stupid pretense of “objectivity”.
He misses the earlier changes by exactly 100 years. He says that newspapers were nichey before 1850 or so, and turned toward pleasing everyone at once because electricity speeded up printing presses. It was cheap to print hundreds of thousands of copies, so it was possible for one paper to serve all of NYC.
Wrong date and wrong direction.
Linotypes came in around 1880, and were vastly more important than electricity. But linotypes made it cheaper to amortize smaller quantities. The time and expense of handsetting pushed printers toward large quantities.
Around 1970 computerized typesetting and offset again made it cheaper to amortize small quantities, but this change wasn’t nearly as important as linotypes.
Newspapers were fully nichy until 1950.. It wasn’t technology that caused the change, because both of the big tech changes trended against massive quantities.
I don’t know what caused the shift. My best guess is that newspapers felt threatened by TV, and started consolidating and monopolizing “for efficiency”.
TV was the first genuinely national media and the first visual competitor. Radio was strongly local at that time. Radio threatened newspapers with faster reporting of sudden events, but radio wasn’t visual. Papers had pictures and comics. TV threatened the eyeball side, which is always more important for humans, and TV was necessarily expensive to produce, which necessarily made it national.
Polistra's Mill 