“The biggest shift is that journalism is no longer the exclusive preserve of journalists. Ordinary people are playing a more active role in the news system, along with a host of technology firms, news start-ups and not-for-profit groups. Social media are certainly not a fad, and their impact is only just beginning to be felt… Successful media organisations will be the ones that accept this new reality. They need to reorient themselves towards serving readers rather than advertisers, embrace social features and collaboration, get off political and moral high horses and stop trying to erect barriers around journalism to protect their position. The digital future of news has much in common with its chaotic, ink-stained past.”—Tom Standage, The Economist, July 7, 2011

[Newsboys greeting a ship in New York Harbor:] “Here’s this morning’s New York Stabber! Here’s the New York Family Spy! Here’s the New York Private Listener! … Here’s the full particulars of the patriotic loco-foco movement yesterday, in which the whigs were so chawed up, and the last Alabama gauging case … and all the Political, Commercial and Fashionable News. Here they are!”

… “It is in such enlightened means,” said a voice almost in Martin’s ear, “that the bubbling passions of my country find a vent.”—Charles Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit, 1844.

“In Poland, a newspaper subscription tends to satisfy purely intellectual needs and is regarded as somewhat of a luxury which the majority of the people can heroically forego; in the United States a newspaper is regarded as a basic need of every person, indispensable as bread itself.”—Henryk Sienkiewicz, Portrait of America, 1876.

“The old saw says, ‘Let a sleeping dog lie.’ Right. Still, when there is much at stake, it is better to get a newspaper to do it.”—Mark Twain, Pudd’nhead Wilson, 1897

“A newspaper should be the maximum of information, and the minimum of comment.” —Richard Cobden (1804-1865)