Various people have been predicting the death of newspapers recently. Or at least their rapid decline. And they've been citing British newspapers reliance on giveaways to drive circulation as one sign of the end. (Apparently more DVDs were given away than British newspapers this year than have been sold by the movie industry.) The Guardian's had huge success with their posters. And we loved The Telegraph's Famous Five CDs. And people love to mock them, point at the cost and claim they're the beginning of the end for newspapers. But aren't they really just the beginning of a new beginning?
Because, apart from your actual news journalism, what newspapers are really good at is creating coherent bundles of opinion. They create interesting and useful edits of the cultural world; at the moment mostly through criticism and reviews, but the posters and DVDs could be seen as their first forays into distributing the actual stuff, not just pointing to it. I could imagine subscribing to a Guardian film-club curated by their reviewers.
Of course, the papers that have a less defined cultural perspective will struggle here. The Indepedent's differentation always seem to be based on adolescent politics to me, so I'm not sure what cultural thing I'd like them to guide me through. Maybe puzzles.
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