May 20 |
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Your Hometown Paper Delivered to Your Hotel
Source: The New York Times
The evening did not start out heavy with promise.
After I checked into the InterContinental Hotel around 8 p.m., my room key didn't work. I went back to the lobby where a desk clerk recoded the card.
This time the key-card opened the door all right. Unfortunately, the room was already occupied. A suitcase sat open by the bed. From behind the bathroom door came the sound of someone taking a shower.
The thought entered my mind that this would be a priceless opportunity for a true wiseacre to rap on the bathroom door and say, in the gruffest possible voice: ''Hello? The escort agency sent me over,'' before dashing out of the room. Instead, I merely slid silently out into the hallway and hustled down to the lobby, where the mix-up was fixed and I was handed the key to the right room.
Still, let's just say I wasn't filled with confidence about the hotel's efficiency when, availing myself of a new guest service InterContinental is promoting, I asked the desk clerk to have sent up to my room immediately the current editions of three newspapers: The Times of India (published daily in Bombay), Die Zeit (a weekly, published in Hamburg, Germany) and The Los Angeles Times. The service is offered by a company called NewspaperDirect.
''I think we can do that,'' the clerk said, though I wasn't hearing a lot of confidence.
Sure enough, though, a bellhop arrived at my room 45 minutes later with the three newspapers, which I had chosen arbitrarily from a list of worldwide papers available. All of them were the current editions literally hot off the presses — or, rather, the hotel's laser printer.
Though printed in black and white, each paper appeared to be an exact reproduction of the entire edition. Die Zeit, for example, weighed in at 74 stapled pages. At 11 inches by 17 inches, the reproductions were slightly smaller than a standard broadsheet newspaper like this one, which is about 13.5 by 22 inches. But they were eminently readable.
They cost $4 apiece. And if I'd wanted, I could have just as easily ordered sent to my room current editions of more than 170 newspapers, most of them dailies, from all over the world: Le Monde from France, Sankei Shimbun from Japan, Al Ayam from Bahrain, Ha-'aretz from Israel, Dagens Nyheter from Sweden, and more than a dozen major papers from the United States.
The idea of trying to sell freshly printed global newspapers on demand in hotels and other locations far from those newspapers' home markets would appear to be risky, if not downright counterintuitive.
Can this possibly work? Keep in mind that a NewspaperDirect predecessor, a company called Press-Point, which pioneered the concept of printing newspapers on demand in hotels and other places, went broke in 2000.
Richard K. Miller, NewspaperDirect's vice president for sales and marketing, explained how he and his colleagues thought they would succeed.
Current laser-printing and highspeed Internet data-transmission technology make it easy to download an entire newspaper and print it cheaply, in a large format, anywhere in the world, he said. The more than 170 newspapers NewspaperDirect has signed distribution agreements with since it was founded four years ago are from over 40 countries.
But the company is not just depending on one-shot sales, he said. NewspaperDirect is also expanding into fixed distribution networks, with local partners in 35 countries who use its technology to print and distribute bulk runs of certain newspapers daily, and deliver the out-oftown or out-of-country papers, just like the local Bugle, to corporate and home subscribers, among them worldwide expatriates.
The service is available in more than 60 countries. It can be found at nearly all of the 130 worldwide Inter-Continental Hotels, and at selected Hilton, Hyatt, Radisson, Kempinsky, W and Marriott hotels, as well as the Bellagio and Venetian hotels in Las Vegas. Qatar Airlines offers it, as do some cruise-ship lines and urban bookstores.
But who in the world would have the audacity to start up an Internetbased information company whose end product is manufactured by a machine using paper and ink? ''The founders of the company are a group of people who are international in nature and in business, and who like to read a newspaper when they travel,'' Mr.Miller said.
Some potential customers are domestic travelers, like me, who can't start the morning without a good newspaper and often find the free one hanging on the hotel doorknob, or the local one for sale in the gift shop, inadequate. But international travelers of all nationalities, whether traveling here or abroad, are the prime customers, willing to pay a premium for a same-day reproduction of the newspaper they depend on.
''We tend to think North America is the center of the world,'' Mr.Miller said. But a lot of the company's circulation is based on a demand for ''newspapers I'd never even heard of'' until recently, he said. ''For example, Aftenposten from Norway'' is popular, as are papers from Sweden, he added.
Despite the availability of most major papers online without charge, print, Mr.Miller said, is still ''the best reading medium.'' Even the heaviest online users often print out articles and documents rather than read them on a screen.
Mr.Miller said the company was not yet profitable, ''but we're moving in that direction, and we're increasing our circulation 8 percent a month, compounded.'' Total circulation now runs 70,000 to 80,000 papers a month. ''We're hoping to see that someday rise to 100,000 a day,'' he said.
Joe Sharkey
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