When I was at school we used to get all the daily and Sunday newspapers delivered. There was a large room (very warm in winter time) with three huge tables in it and boys would casually go in during the day and read. This continued when I was at University where all the papers (expect the ones we occasionally voted to ban) were available.
I recall talking to an Admiral once who had been stationed in London telling me that outside of London one loses touch with what is going on in the world. In London the Admiralty received daily bulletins from the ambassadors around the world and he only had to flick through them to have a sense of how the world was that day.
The need to have all the newspapers (even the money to buy them) went when I left University and indeed the quality of newspaper journalism took some hard knocks as the contest between those who wanted to make a name and those who wanted to find the facts, shifted slightly to the deleterious deep end of the journalistic pool.
But with the INTERNET and places like newseum.org, the ability to scan English language and French language newspapers and get perspective on world events has come into all our lives and even better, the ability to read weblogs accounting for events as they happen from those involved has sidestepped even the influence of journalists.
It is interesting that Governments who always fear revolutions have allowed a political force to enter the world thinking they would make so much money from it, but what they have actually gotten is a challenge.