… in 1918:

In his much remarked-on obituary for the dead dailies in the January 1918 Atlantic Monthly, Oswald Garrison Villard described the passing of these papers in language that could have been lifted from the recent eulogies for the shuttered Seattle Post-Intelligencer and Rocky Mountain News. Villard, editor and publisher of The Nation, called the Boston Journal’s demise a “tragedy of journalism”—one that could potentially slay democracy, too, because multiple news sources were required to present “both sides of every issue” to the citizenry. He was appalled that in a number of big cities—including Cleveland, the nation’s sixth-largest—only one morning paper had survived. (We should be so lucky today.)