In the early years of my consulting career, I was on the road three weeks out of four. Monday through Thursday each month I was in my car, or at O’Hare or Midway airport. My second home was my suitcase. I knew all of the short cuts at the airports: The best places to park, the quickest way through security, the best place to pick up a cab. I knew long ago that you wanted the first flight out each morning if you wanted to avoid delays. On any given Monday you could find me slicing through the crowds, first to gate, first onto the plane.I visited all of the major cities (and many of the smaller towns) in the midwest. Midtown Manhattan was my special playground when it was time to call on publishers, distributors and the bookstore headquarters.One of my best travel friends was the O'Hare airport Chicago Tribune delivery person. Every morning she was there just before 6:00AM with a giant wheeled pallet of fresh Tribune newspapers. A lot of us business travelers would flock to her as she rolled up and started to unload the papers. Even before the newsstands opened up, she sold dozens of papers to us early travelers and we were off into the air to Detroit or Columbus or Minneapolis or Manhattan with our morning papers.All of that is gone now. According the Curbed article below, it's hard to find a newspaper in a New York City newsstand. And in the BoSacks opinion piece, you can't find a newspaper at Hudson retail (I'm traveling today and I can confirm that fact.)Is that sad? Yeah, I suppose so. But we've known that print newspaper circulation has been declining for a very long time. So has print magazine sales at retail. Newspapers and magazines are not much of an impulse buy for quite some time and the COVID-19 pandemic escalated the decline of retail sales for newspapers and magazines.My suspicion is that we've passed the tipping point and we'll see an acceleration of the decline of these sales moving forward. Time moves on. The declines of these industries is sad. The way it's happening could have been avoided, but we don't live backwards so there's no sense in going down that road.It's time to recreate these businesses. It's time for a new business model. What that is, I don't know just yet.
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It's Tuesday: Time Passages - Time for a new…
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In the early years of my consulting career, I was on the road three weeks out of four. Monday through Thursday each month I was in my car, or at O’Hare or Midway airport. My second home was my suitcase. I knew all of the short cuts at the airports: The best places to park, the quickest way through security, the best place to pick up a cab. I knew long ago that you wanted the first flight out each morning if you wanted to avoid delays. On any given Monday you could find me slicing through the crowds, first to gate, first onto the plane.I visited all of the major cities (and many of the smaller towns) in the midwest. Midtown Manhattan was my special playground when it was time to call on publishers, distributors and the bookstore headquarters.One of my best travel friends was the O'Hare airport Chicago Tribune delivery person. Every morning she was there just before 6:00AM with a giant wheeled pallet of fresh Tribune newspapers. A lot of us business travelers would flock to her as she rolled up and started to unload the papers. Even before the newsstands opened up, she sold dozens of papers to us early travelers and we were off into the air to Detroit or Columbus or Minneapolis or Manhattan with our morning papers.All of that is gone now. According the Curbed article below, it's hard to find a newspaper in a New York City newsstand. And in the BoSacks opinion piece, you can't find a newspaper at Hudson retail (I'm traveling today and I can confirm that fact.)Is that sad? Yeah, I suppose so. But we've known that print newspaper circulation has been declining for a very long time. So has print magazine sales at retail. Newspapers and magazines are not much of an impulse buy for quite some time and the COVID-19 pandemic escalated the decline of retail sales for newspapers and magazines.My suspicion is that we've passed the tipping point and we'll see an acceleration of the decline of these sales moving forward. Time moves on. The declines of these industries is sad. The way it's happening could have been avoided, but we don't live backwards so there's no sense in going down that road.It's time to recreate these businesses. It's time for a new business model. What that is, I don't know just yet.