11.06.08
Obama souvenir boon for old media
Newspaper circulations have been declining for years but yesterday’s US election showed that print is not dead (yet).
It seems everyone wanted a copy of the newspaper with the Obama victory front page to keep as a souvenir. In New York people queued in their lunch hour to buy already scarce copies of the New York Times. And on the Today programme on BBC Radio 4 this morning, I heard that people started queueing for a special afternoon edition of the Washington Post with full election coverage before it even actually went on sale.
I’m pretty sure the same thing happened here in the UK. I went out to buy a copy of the paper yesterday evening and it was completely sold out around my flat in the East End. I went to seven different general stores, plus Sainsbury’s supermarket and the service station. All I could find was a copy of trashy tabloid the Daily Star and an early edition of the Daily Telegraph with a pre-result headline. Everywhere I went the staff told me they had been sold out for hours and that it was unusual. I don’t know if this was replicated across London and the UK but certainly in my little corner of the world, people seemed to be buying dead tree versions of the news to keep for posterity.
I’ll have to console myself by looking at pictures of the various front pages online instead.
