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New Newspaper Bins

Chicago newspaper bin, found on Spacing Wire:

newspaper.JPG
 
I am not terribly fond of it - looks like Eucan trash bin IMO.

I'd much rather have standardized bins for individual papers.

AoD
 
ap, newspaper boxes have been banned in Montreal for ages. No free speech challenge there. City owns the sidewalks.
 
Poor montreal. Hopefully the toronto papers will be less stupid.
 
Standardizing boxes is a free speach issue? Sounds like lawyers with too much time on their hands (god help us).
 
Well, yes. Unless you want the government to decide where, when and how many and which newspapers are sold.
 
I think newspaper boxes will still be around. There are places where you find a solo Toronto Star box or a lonely free papers box.

I feel that this will be implemented in only the problem areas where you see 3 or more newspaper boxes.
 
I don't see that as a problem. I see that as a sign of a community where information and ideas are important and vital.
 
"Well, yes. Unless you want the government to decide where, when and how many and which newspapers are sold"

In the streets yes.
 
The smaller papers rely more on single copy sales than the majors, obviously, because they have no subscriber base.

Still, single copy sales - in corner stores and boxes - figure into the equation at all levels. Blame it on USA Today when they launched, in the early 1980's, with their flashy boxes - the competition was forced to upgrade their street presence too.

The days of the honour system - when you dropped money into the box and took a newspaper from the open pile - disappeared years ago, though I remember it in the 1980's.

The internet, and the spreading rash of free newspapers, is having a huge effect. You can't turn a corner downtown without meeting someone in a suit handing out a Globe, enter a No Frills without having a Star thrust at you, or venture onto a campus without finding piles of newspapers. Colleges and universities themselves now churn out massive numbers of student publications, a niche for each college on campus. The market for print publications is competitive, cluttered and overlapping.

Tidying up Toronto's streetscape by introducing multiple-newspaper vending boxes doesn't mean we restrict the freedom of the press, though it does mean someone has to decide which papers are worthy of a place within - and which are renegade publications that must survive as best they can without.
 
But the effect of the bins is that the government restricts the availablity of newspapers. That is not something that the government can or should do.
 
It restricts the availability of free newspapers that have no additional base of paid circulation and delivery far more than the majors.
 
What happens if someone starts another major newspaper. The government will be in the position of denying them a place to sell it. Not that there is any difference between unreasonable restrictions on the availablility of free newspapers vs. ones that cost money.
 

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