What 19th century media can teach us about the future of news

In an era of change and fragmentation, the history of the early American press shows that media is shaped not only by technology, but by infrastructure, law, and society.

The crisis of journalism is almost always framed as a tale of technological disruption, with newspapers cast as the victims and tech platforms as the easy villains.

But that version of the story has always struck me as oversimplified. After all, U.S. newspaper circulation has been steadily declining since the 1950s. You can’t just pin it all on the internet.

What if the industrial news ecosystem of the twentieth century was a historical anomaly? I explore that question in this piece for Columbia Journalism Review, adapted from Empire of Ink.

I’d love to hear what you all think.