Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Notes from the Death of Newsprint

While reading yesterday's paper (in the print edition, thank you very much), I noticed an interesting detail from this NYTimes article on the San Francisco Examiner, which is not long for this world:

''On any sunny weekend, the long brunch lines outside Dottie's True Blue Cafe in the Tenderloin district illustrate the printed paper's shrinking place in city life. People who, a few years ago, would have leafed through The Chronicle while waiting for tables are instead tapping on IPhones and laptops.

"People eat through their whole meals texting, emailing, where they used to read papers," said Kurt Abney, owner of Dottie's. "At the end of the day, we used to have a huge pile of newspapers by the front door that people had left behind, but now it's only a few."

2 comments:

irasocol said...

Coming back from my London escape - why are Brit newspapers still all fine? Is it the high prices they charge (70p to 1 pound)? Or the mass transit culture? Or the unified market? (though even the Belfast Telegraph seems fine) I'm confused by this split between sides of the Atlantic.

Rufus said...

We were talking about that recently. It might have been how many buyouts there have been in American newspapers- this created serious debt to pay off at the same time as more people were getting their news online.

But it might be the culture too. In France, most papers are okay- I think Le Monde has struggled. But then again, there's so much to the paper over there, what with the CDs and DVDs and multiple editions. There's also, it must be said, a reading culture that doesn't exist in many cities here.

Glad you're back- you might want to read the post on the SATs entitled Testing Aptitude Test. You have much more developed opinions on those topics than I do!