This was before Turing and von Neumann; it wasn't well established that everything is data and can be stored and manipulated in arbitrary ways. (Heck, phone companies have trouble with this concept today). They were extrapolating what they saw as the special cases of telephones and cameras and phonographs.

I think the big leap here for him was seeing live events vs. pre-recorded films. When these predictions were written, silent films would have been commonplace and live radio broadcasts weren't around. News would have been distributed via newspaper, sent world-wide by telegraph.

But the phonograph was around for 20 years or so. So there was some information storage, just not the concept of mass reproduction and distribution.

The phonograph and newspaper were forms of mass reproduced, widely distributed storage though. Most of their media at the time would have been from persistant storage of some form, created once and sold many times over (newspaper, records, player piano rolls, etc).