...OK so everyone seems to be talking about the death of newspapers, and surely in print the prospects don't look good, but this morning was a real eye opener for me. I was having breakfast this morning with my good friend Byron Elton. We were sitting in his Manhattan hotel, having breakfast in a large breakfast room. Lots of business people, families and parents all sitting around having breakfast, and from where Byron and I were sitting, we could only see three newspapers.
A couple of interesting things to point out here:
1: Breakfast time is premium time to read a newspaper.
2: A hotel, where a newspaper is left outside your door every morning, is the prime place for people who ordinarily wouldn't read a newspaper, to read one.
3: The average age in the breakfast room was over 30 years old so it wasn't a room full of "wired" people.
So at the right time of day, with the right demographic in the right environment, we only saw three newspapers. This means that reading a physical newspaper is habitually becoming obsolete.
I do agree with Byron that the skills of reading the news, having good journalism and investigation of issues will never go away, but the way of consuming it will go to online, electronic readers like the Kindle, your cell phone, and become news all the time on demand everywhere. Sites like True/Slant will build real audiences and it is easy with browser bookmarking to have these sites become habitual. On my browser bar I have the following destinations, all of which I visit daily if not frequently through the day:
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The one positive thing, think how many trees we'd save when print newspapers go away!
I don't know what hotel you were at, but maybe they aren't giving out newspapers to guests, so they didn't have anything to read. I just read earlier this week that Marriott is going to stop automatically giving newspapers to guests: http://www.businessinsider.com/marriott-drop-automatic-newspaper-subscriptions-2009-4
ReplyDeleteIt was actually the Marriot Marquis in Times SQ, but they had either a Wall St Journal or a USA today outside every room. I arrived at 8.30am and so many rooms hadn't surfaced and picked their papers up.
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