It’s only a small, local symbol of the decline of newspapers, but they still haven’t found anyone who wants to run the newspaper kiosk outside my local tube station.
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Klosed Kiosk
The guys who used to just didn’t make enough money to justify getting up that early and standing in the cold.
And I guess that you can’t sell enough other goods to make it compete with running one of the numerous corner shops in the area. Those shops sell a narrow range of papers but the nearest proper newsagent is ten minutes walk away. Somehow, it makes it just that bit less likely that you will buy a paper, even if it only means taking 30 seconds more to nip into a store.
All this after a weekend conference I attended in Vienna with some top global news people discussing how important newspapers were to society – rather than how to make their journalism more accessible or relevant.
It’s just an incremental step in the decline of the daily paper – but it’s a big loss to the local ecology. I liked those guys – I knew them – I never had to ask for a paper, they knew which one I took.
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