I have recorded one year of imagery in a 1970 newspaper (as a start). Speaking from firsthand experience with comparisons from the last few years, media has taken a huge leap backwards and prejudice and nastiness has increased considerably. This is in spite of most people who haven't compared saying the opposite of what I have observed ("oh, you want to go back to how it was 50 years ago when men were all sexist?"). I could write a novel on that fallacious mindset alone!

This may not be what you meant about romanticising, but modern newspapers have deteriorated significantly.

Part of this deterioration is because of competition in journalism (click bait, a race to the bottom). Part of it is a perverse sense of and fundamental abuse of the term Equality. The abuse of the term equality has then lead to unprecedented gender bullying and some extreme revisionist history that largely remains unchallenged. If you pick up a reasonable paper from 1970, you will realise how sexist we have become! The issue today is that you won't find a reasonable (eg. non sexist) newspaper - there is no choice! Sexism and gender bullying ARE the norm.

Newspapers needed to compete with the Internet. In this respect, the article was fundamentally wrong. Failure to embrace the Internet would have allowed others to fill the void (even if you went online but charged money). More people are now used to digesting news electronically and the Internet makes the content dynamic and interactive.

People will pay good money for good news, but it needs to be good quality. That eliminates most of the market.

Think of games. You can still sell the occasional blockbuster (GTA 5 made a billion dollars worth of sales!!). However, most games on iTunes hover below a few $ and many end up free. Compare this to games 30 years ago where there was a small cheap-end market. Or, CDs. Sales have fallen through the floor, but, a 99c track sells well on iTunes. News isn't quite the same, but you can see that a paradigm shift was inevitable for newspapers with the advent of the Internet.

If there was one thing the papers got wrong, it was the increase in nastiness and prejudice. I believe society is much worse today than it has been in a long time. The caring element is what we've lost. We need a new generation of pioneers to undo the carnage.

And go back to 1900 and you'll find completely biased newpapers (The Arizona Republic used to be called The Arizona Republican: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Arizona_Republic ---that's not the only example either) and over the top reporting that would give newspapers (and TV) a run for their money today (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism). Was it better in the 1970s? Or was the bias better hidden at the time?