The Medium is the Message: An Analysis of the Evolution of Newspaper News Style

School of Philosophy, Heilongjiang University, Harbin, Heilongjiang 150006

Abstract

[Objective] With the rapid advancement of technology, newspaper journalism is undergoing a quiet yet profoundly significant transformation. Studying the evolution of communication media holds great significance for understanding the developmental changes in newspaper news style. [Method] Based on literature research, this paper analyzes the evolution of newspaper news style from several key stages: the popularization of printing technology, the emergence of the telegraph and typewriter, the advent of radio, the impact of television, and the rise of digital media. [Result] These transformations in newspaper news style profoundly illustrate Marshall McLuhan's famous assertion that "the medium is the message," a perspective that finds ample demonstration and validation throughout the evolution of news style. [Conclusion] The progress of science and technology, coupled with the continuous iteration of communication media, not only drives the transformation of newspaper news style but also reveals the essential nature of media's profound influence on journalistic forms. Each technological innovation brings new opportunities and challenges for news style, enabling it to continuously adapt to and lead the trends of the times.

Keywords: media; news style; transformation; McLuhan
Classification Code: G232
Document Identifier: A
Article ID: 1671-0134(2025)05-28-04
DOI: 10.19483/j.cnki.11-4653/n.2025.05.004
Citation Format: Li Shilong. The Medium is the Message: An Analysis of the Evolution of Newspaper News Style [J]. China Media Technology, 2025, 32(5):

1. Overview of "The Medium is the Message" Theory

Marshall McLuhan stands as one of the most influential media theorists of the 20th century, whose ideas profoundly shaped fields including communication studies, philosophy, and cultural research. McLuhan achieved global renown through his seminal work Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, in which he proposed numerous revolutionary concepts that shook the Western world and exerted far-reaching influence on global communication studies. These include "the medium is the message," "hot and cold media," "the global village," "retribalization," and "the extension of consciousness" [1]. These theories challenged traditional linear models of communication, emphasizing that the form of media itself holds greater significance than mere attention to content.

Prior to McLuhan's theoretical contributions, Harold Innis pioneered the "bias of communication" theory, examining the characteristics of various media including clay tablets, papyrus, the alphabet, parchment, hard pens, soft brushes, reed pens, quill pens, and broadcasting [2]. As McLuhan's core concept, "the medium is the message" profoundly influenced postmodern thought and became a key framework for understanding the interplay between technology and society. Through this theory, McLuhan proposed that the form of media itself determines the path of social development; media are not merely tools for transmitting information but forces that shape social culture and individual cognition. This idea sparked widespread discussion during the latter half of the 20th century regarding media technology and its social impact, establishing itself as a foundational theory in media studies, cultural studies, and the philosophy of technology.

The proposition "the medium is the message" essentially means that any medium (that is, any extension of humanity) introduces a new scale or measure that produces effects on individuals and society. Our any extension (or any new technology) introduces a new scale into our affairs [3]. Media are not merely tools for information transmission; they embody specific messages and meanings that shape people's modes of understanding and thinking habits, integrating technological, social, cultural, psychological, and economic attributes. At the technological level, media as products of technological progress directly determine the pathways of information transmission and the efficiency of reception. For instance, the emergence of printing technology greatly facilitated the widespread dissemination of written information, while internet technology made real-time global information exchange possible. At the social level, media shape social structures and patterns of human interaction, with different media forms determining the modes and breadth of communication. Social media, for example, has promoted the popularization of instant interaction, whereas traditional letters provided more private and time-delayed communication. At the cultural level, media serve as carriers of cultural heritage, bearing and transmitting different cultural values. Television and film have played key roles in shaping popular culture, while network media have facilitated the formation and diffusion of subcultures. At the psychological level, media influence people's perceptual and cognitive processes. Visual images from television and film have changed viewing habits, while the internet and mobile devices have cultivated people's ability to engage in fragmented reading and rapid attention switching. At the economic level, media constitute a key component of economic activity, influencing the development of the information industry and related sectors. Economic models such as advertising, content payment, and e-commerce are all closely related to media advancement.

2. The Evolution of Newspaper News Style Through the Lens of "The Medium is the Message"

2.1 The Popularization of Printing Technology: The Rise of Newspaper News Style

The popularization of printing technology, as a pivotal turning point in media history, not only dramatically improved the efficiency of information replication and reduced costs but also exerted profound influence on the formation and development of newspaper news style. First, printing technology enabled newspapers to become a mass communication medium. The advent of printing drastically reduced replication costs and increased speed, allowing newspapers to be mass-produced and rapidly disseminated, thereby influencing the formation and development of news style. Second, printing technology promoted the standardization and normalization of news style. Since printed materials could be mass-produced, newspapers began adopting standardized layout designs and typographic rules to improve production efficiency and reduce costs. This gradually led news style to develop fixed formats, including headlines, leads, and body text, making news reports clearer and easier to read and understand. Third, printing technology made newspaper news style place greater emphasis on objectivity and accuracy. The widespread dissemination of printed materials meant that information's influence and credibility were greatly enhanced, prompting editors and journalists to pay greater attention to factual accuracy and objective reporting. Furthermore, the popularization of printing technology stimulated the diversification of news style. Technological iterations stimulated stylistic innovation, and as printing technology continued to advance, the expansion of layout space enabled diverse forms such as personality profiles and current affairs commentary to flourish. Newspaper news style broke through single narrative frameworks, forming a composite news system that integrated reading aesthetics with informational value. To accommodate readers' habits, newspaper news style shed cumbersome rhetoric and employed accessible vernacular expression. This linguistic shift not only broadened the readership but also shaped the basic form of modern public language.

2.2 The Emergence of the Telegraph and Typewriter: Sharing the Honor of Shaping News Style

The emergence of the telegraph and typewriter, as critical nodes in information transmission technology, exerted tremendous influence on the transformation of newspaper news style—a phenomenon that aligns with McLuhan's "the medium is the message" theory. In May 1844, Washington successfully sent the first telegraph signal in human history. This historic event was immediately recognized for its profound academic value by Bennett of the New York Herald, who declared: "Washington's telegraph communications have annihilated space... It has inaugurated a new epoch in news reporting" [4]. The introduction of telegraph technology significantly increased information transmission speed. However, due to early telegraph technology's limitations and high costs, journalists writing telegraph copy strove for conciseness, eliminating all unnecessary adjectives and adverbs to convey core information with the most refined text possible.

The typewriter transformed the news writing process. Its standardized fonts and formats promoted the normalization of news style, giving newspaper reports a more uniform and professional appearance. Walter Fox vividly described the typewriter's impact: journalists using typewriters "seemed to transfer the machine's staccato tick-tick rhythm onto the copy itself. Sentences grew shorter, becoming purely dynamic sounds. Superfluous adjectives and adverbs were deleted to highlight verbs." Consequently, the telegraph and typewriter "share the honor of shaping news style" [6]. Reviewing this history reveals that the telegraph and typewriter represented not merely an iteration of communication tools but a crucial leap for journalism from handicraft to mechanization. They forced the news industry to establish three modern principles: "speed priority," "production standardization," and "information density." The adaptive thinking inherent in these technologies continues today in applications of artificial intelligence and 5G technology, where we can still see the innovative genes projected by that 1844 telegraph signal.

2.3 The Advent of Radio: Nurturing Diverse News Styles

In the early 20th century, radio rose as an independent force, challenging the dominant position of newspaper media. In November 1920, the world's first radio station—KDKA in Pittsburgh, USA—was officially established, and within subsequent years, numerous countries built their own radio stations. Radio's unique communication charm quickly attracted large audiences and advertisers, causing traditional newspaper media to experience a cliff-like decline in sales and ushering in the news industry's first digital reshuffling. As an emerging news medium independent of newspapers, radio broke the monopoly held by the press. It may be argued that diverse media can provide important psychological cues: in this realm, multiple operations and varied operations are not only possible but necessary. Diverse media also nurtured an era of competing newspaper styles [7].

Radio's creation of the "accompanying listening" scenario unexpectedly stimulated newspapers' potential for visual communication, prompting them to emphasize visual zoning in layout design and laying the groundwork for modern news visualization. Radio's emergence not only produced new reporting forms such as live connections and audio documentaries but also created a dual competitive structure of immediacy versus depth, providing原始动力 for media convergence. When newspaper journalists began borrowing radio's sense of immediacy in expression and broadcasters began learning narrative structures from newspaper journalism, the genetic fusion between different media ultimately nurtured diverse news styles and formed the prototype of multimedia communication.

2.4 The Impact of Television: The Depth Turn in Newspaper News Style

After the 1960s, the television industry entered a period of vigorous development, and the television wave gradually entered people's lives. Television transmitted vivid news information through dual dimensions of vision and hearing, undoubtedly posing a tremendous challenge to traditional newspapers and forcing them to re-examine and improve their competitive strategies. An emerging medium will never simply attach itself to an old medium, nor will it allow the old medium to remain unchanged. It will continuously exert pressure on outdated media until it finds new forms and positions for them [8]. Each new medium's birth is accompanied by intense impact.

In its efforts toward "visualization," newspaper news style gave rise to the new category of "visual news." According to Gan Xifen's Dictionary of Journalism, "visual news" refers to "news reports that present things through figurative techniques to achieve visual impact effects. It concretizes abstract concepts and writes news through vivid images and typical details, making report content audible, visible, tangible, and sensible, thereby showing audiences the true face of reported facts. In an era when television news is increasingly visualized, visual news has become an important strategy for text-based news to compete" [7]. Television's interactivity also impacted newspaper news style. Television programs typically allowed audience participation via telephone or internet, a sense of engagement that newspapers struggled to provide. To compensate for this deficiency, newspapers began adding reader participation sections such as letters to the editor, commentaries, and columns to enhance interaction and connection with readers.

While newspaper news style could absorb television's strengths to enhance competitiveness,挖掘并创新自身独特优势才是更为关键的竞争手段. Television news undoubtedly held significant advantages in presenting "visible" content, but newspaper news style could发挥其独特作用 when dealing with "invisible" content, thereby catalyzing the rise of in-depth reporting. In-depth reporting delves deeply into information behind the facts, characterized by objectivity, depth, comprehensiveness, and rigor, also known as explanatory reporting. Jack Highton once stated: "Explanatory reporting is a type of reporting that explains or analyzes, which is the overused term 'in-depth reporting.' It is reporting that adds background to reveal deeper meaning" [9]. The renowned American journalist Walter Lippmann also offered incisive insights on explanatory reporting, noting that when faced with complex and continuously emerging facts, news reporting would become ambiguous in meaning without interpretation. Therefore, a new era began in which "why" became as important as "what." If a Washington journalist only reported what happened without explaining why and pointing out its significance, he had only completed half the work [10].

2.5 The Rise of Digital Media: Revolutionary Changes in News Style

As one of the most transformative media forms of the 21st century, the rise of digital media has brought revolutionary changes to news style. The rapid development of digital media is reshaping the landscape of news communication. The physical boundaries of traditional newspaper news style have been broken, with AI-automated news production, immersive news scenarios constructed by the metaverse, and interactive data-driven news narratives transforming news from one-way transmission to multi-dimensional communication.

The application of artificial intelligence in news communication is primarily manifested in automated production. Its powerful data processing capabilities can rapidly extract valuable information, greatly improving news gathering efficiency and saving considerable time compared to the past. Tencent's AI-powered "Dreamwriter" writing robot can analyze and report breaking news within minutes, whereas traditional methods might require lengthy periods for information collection and manuscript preparation. Here, AI holds an absolute advantage in timeliness, but its style tends toward standardization, lacking emotional resonance and humanistic care—qualities that often make human-written news reports more touching [11]. For news practitioners, AI also places higher demands on their professional skills, requiring them to continuously enhance their professional competence and management capabilities, innovate and improve work patterns based on AI's characteristics and development, thereby strengthening news appeal [12]. The development of AI technology is driving the news industry toward intelligentization. At the micro level, AI enables collaborative operation, integrated management, and intensive allocation of news production processes; at the macro level, AI is reshaping the news communication ecosystem. The news industry urgently needs to establish an AI-adaptive development mechanism, constructing a sustainable development paradigm for the AI era through technological integration innovation and business model reconstruction [13].

The metaverse, utilizing virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and mixed reality (MR) technologies, creates possibilities for "spatial presence" in news broadcasting, enabling news to break through physical limitations and transforming audiences from third-person observers to first-person participants, thereby fostering the development of "participatory journalism." As an emerging technology, the metaverse brings infinite development opportunities to the news industry but also presents new risks and challenges. For instance, in reporting on the Russia-Ukraine conflict, using metaverse technology to simulate battlefield conditions blurs the boundary between news and games, with excessive gamification raising ethical concerns. The metaverse, with its unique communication methods, brings entirely new experiences to news industry development, while regulatory authorities also need to keep pace with the times in formulating relevant rules to regulate metaverse technology applications. As technology develops and application scenarios expand, the metaverse has become an important frontier in news communication [14].

The application of interactive data journalism marks a paradigm shift from "producer-centered" to "audience-centered" approaches, with media transforming complex data into explorable dynamic charts. Currently, numerous domestic and international media outlets have established data journalism columns and assembled data journalism teams, with excellent results achieved in practice by The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, and Xinhua News Agency [15]. Based on published data journalism works, infographic data journalism represents the mainstream form, though interactive data journalism may become the new form of future data journalism [16]. However, interactive data journalism also faces challenges. Practice shows that while significant breakthroughs have been achieved in technical interaction, there remains obvious room for improvement in the communication-teaching dimension. While developing the strong expressive and multi-dimensional advantages of interactive data journalism, the auxiliary function of text itself cannot be neglected. Coordinating the relationship between data visualization and textual narrative has become a core issue urgently needing resolution in the development of interactive data journalism.

Conclusion

The development history of media is essentially a history of media shaping society, innovating society, and driving social progress—simultaneously, a history of media continuously creating messages (the medium is the message) [17]. In examining the evolution of newspaper news style, we can clearly observe that the emergence of new media technologies serves as the core driving force for its transformation. As a typical representative of traditional media, newspaper news style has undergone a transformation from singularity to diversity and from linearity to interactivity, from the printing era to the multimedia convergence of the digital age. Each media technology innovation has reshaped the speed, scope, and depth of news communication, thereby exerting profound influence on the public's cognitive patterns and value orientations.

As we focus on the digital transformation of newspaper news style, cutting-edge technologies such as artificial intelligence, blockchain traceability, and 5G networks are reconstructing the genetic map of the news media industry. Traditional newspaper news has broken through the physical boundaries of print, achieving breakthrough innovations in AI news production, metaverse news studios, and interactive data journalism. News has transformed from one-way information transmission to multi-directional communication platforms. This transformation compels us to re-examine the nature of news and how to maintain its authenticity and authority in new media environments.

The matching of form and content is closely related, as different forms suit different content, and different styles can better convey specific information. The evolution of newspaper news style profoundly illustrates McLuhan's famous proposition that "the medium is the message." The transformation of newspaper news style is not merely a technological upgrade but a profound change in communication concepts and audience interaction methods. News organizations need to reconsider how to maintain content authenticity and authority in new media environments and how to stand out in fierce market competition. Simultaneously, audiences need to adapt to new information acquisition methods, learn to distinguish truth from falsehood, and cultivate critical thinking.

Media play a decisive role in shaping and regulating the dimensions and manifestations of human communication behavior; they are extensions of human senses. In terms of influence on human sensory experience, social structure composition, and social transformation processes, media carry more profound significance and value than content itself [18]. The evolution of newspaper news style is essentially a process of continuously adapting to new technologies and new demands. In this process, the matching of form and content becomes particularly important. Different forms suit different messages, and different styles can better convey specific content. The transformation process of newspaper news style not only reflects the progress of media technology but also reflects the development of social culture and changes in audience demand. Through this transformative process, we can more deeply understand McLuhan's proposition that "the medium is the message"—that media are not merely carriers of information but are themselves part of the message, influencing both how information is transmitted and how audiences receive it.

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Author Introduction: Li Shilong (2000—), male, Han ethnicity, from Pingdingshan, Henan, master's student at the School of Philosophy, Heilongjiang University. Research direction: philosophy of science and technology.

(Responsible Editor: Li Yansong)