Future Of News? Newsroom As A Cafe

Jeff Sonderman points us to the fascinating story of a newspaper in the Czech Republic that is experimenting with making newsrooms into cafes. One of my big complaints about newspapers these days is how little they’ve done to help enable their community to participate in the news process (whether it’s finding, writing, discussing, distributing or sharing the news). However, it looks like Nase Adresa is going a step further than just enabling the community online. It’s enabling it in real space as well — creating a news cafe. It combines both a newsroom and a typical cafe, so people can come and interact with editors and reporters, see the paper being created — or even chip in and help out as well. And they’re also doing more to serve the community than just offering up coffee and bites to eat, but are also holding concerts at the cafes as well (rescuing news and the music industry in one shot?). Apparently circulation is growing — with 50% of subscriptions coming from people who happened to stop into the cafe.

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