The first printed mass medium was probably not books but cheap European prints
China printed the Diamond Sutra in 868 and invented clay movable type in 1041. Yet limited literacy and costly paper held back a mass market there. The earliest true mass medium was likely the popular prints churned out in Europe from around 1400, almost none of which survive.
Mass media are the channels that reach large audiences: print, broadcast, recordings, digital and social platforms, streaming, advertising and events. The word mass does not mean a fixed number of people actually receive something, only that it is available in principle to many. Mass media therefore include small alternative outlets using mass technology, which is why the term is not quite a synonym for mainstream media.
Gutenberg printed a Latin Bible with movable type in 1453, but books stayed too expensive to count as a mass medium for at least another century. Newspapers emerged around 1612, with the first English one in 1620, and only reached mass audiences in the nineteenth century, when steam-driven rotary presses and railways let London titles such as The Times circulate widely. The phrase the media dates from the 1920s, and mass media meant mostly print until radio and television spread after the Second World War.
Classification keeps shifting. Late twentieth-century analysts listed eight industries, from books to television. By the early 2000s a scheme of seven mass media took hold, running from print in the late fifteenth century and recordings in the late nineteenth to the internet and mobile phones, and some argue video games deserve their own slot. The sociologist John Thompson of Cambridge described mass communication as one-to-many, turning symbolic forms into commodities and separating the places where messages are made from where they are received.
Ownership is heavily concentrated, and some see that as a danger to democracy. Between 1985 and 2018 about 76,720 media mergers and acquisitions worth around 5.6 trillion dollars were announced, peaking in 2007 with some 3,808 deals. The biggest was AOL's purchase of Time Warner. A 2012 article claimed six companies, including Disney, News Corp and CBS, owned 90 percent of US mass media.
Source: Mass media
