Some worried that the telegraph would be the death of newspapers, heretofore “the rapid and indispensable carrier of commercial, political and other intelligence,” as an American journalist put it. For this purpose the newspapers will become emphatically useless. Anticipated at every point by the lightning wings of the Telegraph, they can only deal in local “items” or abstract speculations. Their power to create sensations, even in election campaigns, will be greatly lessened—as the infallible Telegraph will contradict their falsehoods as fast as they can publish them.
The rate of information transmission seems always to have been at odds with content producers’ understanding of “quality.”
The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick (via Findings.com)
