I am in Barcelona (Spain) on my way to Dubai, and yesterday I saw many newsstands closed.
In many European cities you can’t find newsstands open on Saturday afternoons and evenings.
El Economista said last Friday that in Barcelona an average newsstand used to sell 600 publications in 2000.
Today they sell only 300 publications.
And you can buy a newsstand in Barcelona for only 40,000 euros ($52,000), but many are unsold for months.
Barcelona has only 365 newsstands today and 25 are on sale.
In Madrid, the same.
In 2005 there were 978 newsstands.
Today, only 800.
And the trend is very similar around Europe.
In France there were 33,540 newsstands in 1995.
Today, only 28,275.
In contrast, all these cities and countries have seen a boom of free publications and “newspaper boys and girls” giving away these new papers.
The paid print media have to react.
The crisis of the newsstands is their crisis, too.
Distribution has always been, as INNOVATION has said for many years, “the black hole of the newspaper industry.”
UPDATE: Here is the picture that Lionel took in Barcelona with a newsstand handeling free papers.
