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.
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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