Color reversal film was expensive and completely impractical to print on a large scale, especially for professional photographers who would go through a whole roll in mere minutes, if even that. Color negative film was generally pretty terrible with an absolutely horrendous shelf life. It suffered from light sensitivity issues and was just not very well suited for journalistic purposes. Even if they did use color film, very few people, most likely only the editorial staff, would ever see it printed in color. It would not be published in color at the time. The only way the color version would conceivably reach a mass audience is through republication decades later in a book. Color photographs were only printed in color in art books, advertisements, or catalogues, as a general rule. In rare instances color exhibitions were held, but these were rare as well due to color photography being perceived as “pedestrian” - 90% of the time it was used by vacationers and tourists.
So while technically speaking, color photography was widely and readily available continuously from 1907, due to the impracticality and expense of reproduction, mass media, with the exception of television (video, not film), was 90% black and white up until the 1990s. There had to be a justification for the expense of printing in color - for example a subscription publication such as National Geographic, other source of additional funding such as grants, or some perceived sales value, etc. Newspaper photographs certainly weren’t considered important enough to do this. And their subscribers would certainly not have been happy with the substantial price increase that would have been necessary with the printing technology at the time - and also, you have to print a metric ton of these every minute, only black and white could do that.
Color reversal film was expensive and completely impractical to print on a large scale, especially for professional photographers who would go through a whole roll in mere minutes, if even that. Color negative film was generally pretty terrible with an absolutely horrendous shelf life. It suffered from light sensitivity issues and was just not very well suited for journalistic purposes. Even if they did use color film, very few people, most likely only the editorial staff, would ever see it printed in color. It would not be published in color at the time. The only way the color version would conceivably reach a mass audience is through republication decades later in a book. Color photographs were only printed in color in art books, advertisements, or catalogues, as a general rule. In rare instances color exhibitions were held, but these were rare as well due to color photography being perceived as “pedestrian” - 90% of the time it was used by vacationers and tourists.
So while technically speaking, color photography was widely and readily available continuously from 1907, due to the impracticality and expense of reproduction, mass media, with the exception of television (video, not film), was 90% black and white up until the 1990s. There had to be a justification for the expense of printing in color - for example a subscription publication such as National Geographic, other source of additional funding such as grants, or some perceived sales value, etc. Newspaper photographs certainly weren’t considered important enough to do this. And their subscribers would certainly not have been happy with the substantial price increase that would have been necessary with the printing technology at the time - and also, you have to print a metric ton of these every minute, only black and white could do that.