It’s Your Nickel

In August 2001, the Omaha World-Herald opened a gleaming production facility, clad in glass so that downtown passersby could watch the miracle of 75,000 newspapers being printed and folded per hour. In September 2007, Toronto’s Globe and Mail joined Twitter, four months before the Toronto Star but six months after the Washington Post, so that it could share happenings with its audience in almost real time. And in May 2017, the New York Times introduced a Kids supplement in its Sunday edition, so that parents might enjoy A1 in peace (“This section should not be read by grown-ups,” a recent issue noted). With The Sunday Paper: A Media History, the Canadian scholars Paul Moore and Sandra Gabriele detail how a competitive cadre of American publishers, editors, and distributors laid the foundations for these and countless other innovations more than a century ago.