In January 1901, Alfred Harmsworth, an Anglo-Irish businessman who had recently risen to international prominence as the founder of the spectacularly successful London newspaper the Daily Mail, looked ahead with confidence at the prospects for the press industry. ‘The future of journalism in the twentieth century impresses me as being full of hopefulness’, he wrote in the North American Review: ‘There are abundant signs that we are witnessing the birth of developments in newspaper enterprise which will make the past look insignificant by contrast … we shall see– or our children will see– journalism brought to a standard of excellence hitherto unattained’ (Harmsworth 1901: 79, 86). He predicted that newspapers would experiment with new styles and formats, improve newsgathering, and benefit from new printing technologies, thereby ensuring that they were not so ‘hopelessly clumsy in shape, verbose as to matter, and most imperfect as a record’ as at present. ‘By the use of improved machinery’, Harmsworth noted, foreshadowing the tabloid that would come to dominate popular journalism, ‘it would be possible to issue the newspaper of the future in what is obviously its proper form– a small, portable and neatly indexed publication.’ ‘Combination and centralization’ would enable greater efficiency and economies of scale, and titles would be printed in different sites around the country– indeed, he predicted that one or two ‘simultaneous newspapers’ could dominate ‘almost the whole of Great Britain’. Markets were expanding as the population increased and education spread, and the recent growth of readership ensured that the press was ‘in touch with the people to an extent never attained before’. The press, in short, was ‘keeping step with the march of a progressive age’, and had ‘its best days to come’ (Harmsworth 1901: 79, 90).

Harmsworth accurately predicted many of the most significant developments of modern print journalism, even if his optimistic reading of them was not shared by critics who feared the consequences of a more centralised industry subjected to the rigours of market competition and required to appeal to mass audiences.