📑 Why the “golden age” of newspapers was the exception, not the rule

John Maxwell Hamilton and Heidi Tworek point out that the ‘golden years’ of newspapers between 1940 and 1980 was an anomaly in a longer, four-century history of news. In part this is a myth carried by a certain group in society:

The 1940s to 1980s were a golden age for newspaper owners to make money and journalists to make news. But they were only a golden age for a certain group of people. Many citizens — women and African-Americans, to take just two examples — often did not see themselves in news reporting and had few opportunities to shape it. It is no surprise that most of those writing the laments for times gone by are white men. Those men have long practiced such lamentations. Even in the 1980s, discussions at the American Society for Newspaper Editors were filled with a “persistent nostalgia for a mythic golden age when news was better made and better respected by the public.”

Cory Doctorow touches upon the association between newspapers and advertising in a recent interview for …