NewspaperShift::Are Print Newspapers Alive and Well in Spain?
From a picture window in an office from where I am writing in the Gracia neighborhood of Barcelona, I can see the same sights I could see from a similar window in my former neighborhood in San Francisco: pedestrians, taxis, cafes and bookstores. But there is something different about my view here: I can spot three different storefronts specializing in newspapers and magazines, all on one block and on one side of the street. A couple of yards away, there are more newsstands. A visit to the corner cafe reveals something else that’s rather curious: the room full of coffee drinkers is full of people reading the news — not on laptops or iPhones — but on good old-fashioned pulp.
Is print alive and well in Spain? For now, it seems so. Last year the National Statistics Institute here released data which showed that Spaniards are buying more newspapers than they were five years ago — a trend that is just the opposite in many other countries. The national average of daily newspaper readers in Spain increased from 36.3 percent in 2000 to 41.8 percent in 2006. But even with those statistics, some media experts believe there are reasons to worry that newspapers here might follow the same downward trend of their U.S. counterparts.
A few months ago I told you all about my split with print publications and my near total conversion to online media for news. In contrast, most of the good citizens of Barcelona, arguably the country’s tech capital, seem to get their news the old fashioned way. I wondered why, and while I don’t have a definitive answer and my speculations are those of an outsider, I have a few theories:
Barrio Relationships
Small businesses still thrive in Spain. Newspaper stands, like fruit stands, fish markets, hardware stores and bakeries, tend to be mom-and-pop operations. Multinational businesses like Starbucks and Ikea have crept into Spain and Spanish companies also operate large stores of all types, but the small family business is still around. I can’t imagine even a quarter of the newspaper stands in a typical U.S. city being able to survive selling print publications, but here they seem to manage.
In addition, business transactions in these shops are more personal experiences. Perhaps it’s more appealing to go down and buy the newspaper from the same nice shopkeeper every day or every weekend, and the rewards of that one bit of personal interaction might outweigh the questionable rewards we reap by staring blankly at laptop screens and clicking around.
I decided to try it out. I went to what they call a “paper store” — a shop selling office supplies as well as some print media — and bought a magazine. The older woman who rang me up, more than likely the owner, let me know that the issue of Time Out Barcelona I was about to purchase was going to expire tomorrow, and advised me to wait until then to get a copy. She went on to tell me that Time Out Barcelona had only been in circulation a couple of months, but that it’s much better than the other local-happenings publication, because of the wide array of topics it covers, and because the content is more interesting and well-written.
I’ve found that purchases here tend to come with such service. Many people tell me that Barcelona isn’t like the rest of Spain, where these interactions are often more frequent and lengthy, but there is this sort of social dance that is done with transactions, and if you give up the daily paper you give up that interaction.
Cafe Culture
Many Spaniards — particularly men — have three places they go daily: work, home and “the bar.” The bar is actually more of a cafe, and there are several on almost every street. The bar is a place where you meet up with other regulars, have a coffee, read the paper or — even better — talk news with others. In this city, plagued by water shortages, hellish traffic, rising housing costs and other urban maladies, people love to talk news and the bar is the perfect place to do that.
Where would a laptop fit into all this? Who needs online news when the paper’s sitting rig ...
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