Reports of print’s death have been greatly exaggerated. But if you thought that the digital doomsdayers themselves are a recent phenomenon, you’d be wrong.

As Matt Novak eloquently points out on Gizmodo, as early as 1928 pundits were predicting the death of newspapers. Why? Radio.

‘What for example could be staler than to-morrow morning’s newspaper account of a prize-fight or political convention one has already received over the radio?’ one newspaper commentator wrote in 1928.

As Novak points out, however, more astute observers saw things differently. One such was Silas Bent, a newspaper reporter who thought that although newspaper would adapt to a world of instant wireless news, they would have to adapt. Bent saw newspapers breaking in two: sensational tabloids and higher brow, thoughtful newspapers.

Bent was convinced that the latter of these two could retain their readerships through changing their editorial stance; people would buy such newspapers for the quality of their comment pieces and analyses of news they had already read, often the day before.

And what did Bent make of the tabloids?

‘Their photographers will scour the earth to make snap-shots of the bizarre and the shocking and the freakish. Their reporters, such as they have, will carry wireless transmitting devices, and will talk off their reports into their offices. But they will not be much concerned with news. Their chief function will be to entertain and thrill the mentally deficient. They will be called newspapers, but they will be that only to the extent of one half of 1%.’

Does that sound familiar? To Novak it kind of does – he thinks that supposedly bifurcated media is joining up again.

Because just as outlets like Buzzfeed and Huffington Post and yes, Gizmodo, mix the trivially interesting with serious reporting, so too did the vast majority of publications in Bent’s time. The great divergence of high and low journalism has come together again, if it ever actually diverged at all.