Digital age or not, The Washington Post, New York Times and other newspapers are printing extra "commemorative" editions today to satisfy the desire for keepsake print editions. As Washington City Paper notes:
The Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News are printing extra copies of today’s paper. So is the Chicago Sun-Times. And the New York Times. And the Raleigh News & Observer. And—oh, whatever, looks like every daily newspaper in the country is printing extra copies. So when your grandkids ask, “What was it like when Obama got elected?” you can show them something. And when they ask, “What’s a newspaper?” you can show them that too.
Touché.
Interestingly, the first thing I did this morning was go collect the NY Times and other papers as a keepsake for my now 10 month old daughter. I figure these will be as valuable to her someday as the papers I have from the early '60s. Now the question is how best to preserve them. And someone needs to come up with a commemorative web archive for all the great online stuff.
Posted by: Larry Perlstein | November 05, 2008 at 09:58 PM
I'm concerned that the more ink-stained of our colleagues are taking the wrong message from Wednesday's extraordinary sales.
Hint: it wasn't about the newspapers.
The people buying papers Wednesday had an emotional connection with Barack Obama and a moment in history, not the paper. They used the paper as a permanent, undeniable record of the moment. Look how many people you can find in flickr posing with the paper, in the mirror image of a hostage photo taken to prove the captive was still alive on a particular day. The paper better serves this purpose than a print-out of a web page. It’s more real, it’s cheap, and it is easily portable through time.
More here:
http://timwindsor.com/2008/11/05/why-people-had-to-have-a-newspaper-today-and-what-does-that-tell-us-about-a-business-model/
Posted by: Tim Windsor | November 06, 2008 at 09:11 AM