"He who would letterspace Italics would steal sheep" My suspicion (but a long time since I read my last book on typography) is that italic types were deliberately based upon handwriting - and therefroe should not (in theory could not) be 'spaced'.
It was a long time before I realised that italic types were not merely mechanically slanted versions of the roman fonts. Still longer before I realised that, in theory, there cannot be such a thing as an italic non-serif (or sans serif) face. The things we learn, eh?
For what it's worth, my typesetting experiences weren't in journalism, but in advertising, during artwork preparation. Many's the time, at two in the morning, that I have been sitting at the typesetter's whilst he churned out (on a machine now made redundant by AppleMacs) yet another copy variant (justified left and right - so as to give the cut-paste artists nightmares), which we then pasted, dried, and ran with to the processing studio...
Back to work at 8 the next morning, of course - but I was younger then and simply thought of it as exciting, not exhausting.
