Get Over It

I was in New York City for the weekend. Early Saturday morning I walked over to the Rockefeller Center Starbucks for a coffee and a copy of the Times. Got the coffee. No Times.
     Where can I get one, I asked the barista. She didn’t know.
     Huh?
     Okay, so she doesn’t read the Times.
     I asked a uniformed security guy, classic New Yorker.

“Used to be a stand in the basement here, but they took it out. There was one over on the corner. It’s gone. There were three here. Did you try a drug store?”

By now I was so flummoxed I didn’t care whether the drug store had papers. I returned to the hotel—half a block away—and asked the desk clerk. Hotels have papers for their guests. Don’t they?

“There are some in the restaurant for browsing, but you can’t take it.”

I can’t buy a Times? In the middle of Manhattan? I thought, but did not say: Why the hell not?

“Well,” said the desk clerk, “maybe in the middle of Manhattan....”

And 51^st between Fifth and Sixth is not the middle?

Manhattan news stand in 2011, via iStockphoto.

That afternoon on a three-hour walk around the city I saw exactly one corner news stand. What happened and when did they disappear? Yesterday? Last week?

I was a newspaper man for forty-one years, and when I thought about it I knew perfectly well why there were no papers. The answer was simple. If there were a profit to be made selling them in Manhattan, people would sell them. If not, then not. News is available—often free—online. Many people don’t read newspapers, and the publishers are learning that they should be glad of that. For them, it’s a blessing.

Think about it. Transmitting information via ink on paper is a Fifteenth Century technology now hopelessly inefficient. We think paper is lightweight, but it’s not. If a Sunday Times weighs a pound, then the Sunday circulation of a million copies weighs a million pounds. Delivering them requires hundreds of big trucks, pay and benefits for hundreds of drivers not to mention the pressmen, and there’s ink, paper, dealers’ markup, et cetera. These costs can be eliminated, and not replaced, by transmitting content instantly via the Internet. Why would one do otherwise when advertising revenues are drying up, as they have been for two decades? Costs that can be eliminated must be eliminated for news companies to survive. The old business model no longer works.

I had known this would happen. I hadn’t expected to see it so dramatically and quickly.