The forgotten contraption that gave birth to mass media

Meaning:Provenance is the record of where something came from and whose hands it passed through on the way to you. It is used most often about art and antiques — a painting's provenance is the documented chain of owners running back to the artist's studio — and lately about photographs and data online. It is not quite a synonym for origin: provenance is the traceable trail, the thing that lets you decide whether to trust the object in front of you. The article uses it to explain why print was distrusted at first — a spoken message came from someone standing in front of you and a manuscript came in a hand you might recognise, but a printed sheet arrived anonymous and identical to a thousand others, its provenance stripped off by the very machine that made it cheap.

Meaning:Sensationalism is the practice of presenting news so as to excite or shock an audience rather than to inform it — leading with the goriest detail, the angriest quote, the most alarming number available, because that is what makes a person stop and look. The ending -ism marks it as a habit or tendency of a whole trade rather than a single act, and the word is nearly always an accusation: nobody describes their own work that way. In the article it names the price of the 20th-century newspaper's new arrangement. Once a paper's income depended on the size of the crowd it could gather rather than on a political party's backing, whatever gathered a crowd fastest had a permanent pull on the front page.

Meaning:Indiscriminate means done without making distinctions — without picking and choosing, applied to everything alike. It sits on the older and neutral sense of discriminate, which simply meant to tell things apart; today that verb usually means treating people unfairly by race or sex, a narrowing of the same root that makes the two words look unrelated when they are not. The 1904 complaint quoted here is that writers would reach for the typewriter for absolutely everything, exercising no judgment about which occasions deserved the slower care of a pen, and that writing with that filter switched off would coarsen the language.

Laying out a single page of a book took two hours, and spectators paid money to watch speed-typesetting tournaments the way they might watch a track meet. To see how a job that sounds that dull could be either of those things, you need to know what setting type physically was — the central craft of printing for four and a half centuries.

A press does not draw letters; it stamps them. So before anything can be printed, a person has to build the page out of small metal blocks, one block per character, each carrying a raised mirror-image letter on its face. Typesetting is that building job: reaching into a wooden case, picking out the block for t, then h, then e, packing them into a line, wedging in blank metal spacers until that line is exactly as wide as every other, and stacking the lines into a solid page-shaped slab. Ink the raised faces, press paper down onto them, lift it off, and there is the page. Every copy after the first is then fast and nearly free — which is exactly why printing was cheap and typesetting was the expensive bottleneck. The slow part happened once, by hand, before a single sheet came off.

The blocks sat in two cases stacked in front of the compositor, capitals in the upper one and small letters in the lower, which is where uppercase and lowercase come from. So does cliché: a phrase wanted so often that printers had it cast as one ready-made block instead of setting it letter by letter every time. Words from a shop floor end up in ordinary speech when the craft was once everywhere.

Mergenthaler's move was not to arrange the letters faster but to stop arranging them: the operator typed, and the machine moulded each whole line as one fresh slug of hot metal, to be melted down again after printing. When a technology looks stuck, the useful question is which single step inside it is still being done by hand.

The oddest claim in this article is that chasing the masses pushed newspapers toward an air of objectivity and, in the same breath, toward sensationalism. Even-handedness and shock, produced by one and the same force. It only makes sense once you look at who was actually paying.

A mass-circulation newspaper has two sets of customers, not one. Readers hand over a few cents, which historically came nowhere near covering newsprint, ink, presses and wages. The real money came from the second customer, the advertiser — who is not buying the newspaper at all but buying access to the people reading it, and who pays roughly in proportion to how many of them there are. The product sold to the paying customer, in other words, is the audience. Economists call a business shaped like this, serving two groups that are each worth more to it because of the other, a two-sided market, and you are standing inside one every time you use something free.

Both of the article's opposite-looking effects fall straight out of that arithmetic. A 19th-century paper bankrolled by a political party wrote for that party's supporters, and the other half of town was never the point. A paper bankrolled by an advertiser who wants to sell soap to the whole town cannot afford to drive half the town away, so a reputation for even-handedness turns commercially useful — whether or not a single person's convictions changed. But the same arithmetic pays for audience by any route at all, and shock gathers one faster than care does. National brands appear for the same reason: a name like Kodak or Campbell's is only worth building once there is a single enormous audience you can tell about it all at once.

The habit worth keeping: when something is free, find the paying customer and work out what they are buying. That answer, rather than the mission statement, usually explains why the thing is built the way it is.