Uber driving down price of Boston cab medallions, helps put local taxi trade publication out of business

When I first was trying to get into the news business around here, I had a job interview at the Carriage News. The editor picked me up at the train station in an old station wagon and drove me back to the office to chat. It was a makeshift space (which isn't unusual for journalism places) filled with file cabinets in some sort of warehouse district. A lot of their content, I was told, was apparently articles republished from other taxi newspapers around the country. My understanding is that they distributed it at local hotel lobbies. At least that's how I vaguely remember it. Anyway, I didn't get the job (which says something about how poor my options were at the time). As years passed, I started to wonder if the whole thing was a dream. A whole secret world of taxi cab newspapers? Right. It seemed more like an invention from a Ben Katchor comic than real life. But a decade or so later, I began running into the art critic from the Carriage News, a sweet woman who wrote about theater and painting and so on. I'd run into her at exhibition previews at the Museum of Fine Arts and the like. And I'm still not sure which is stranger--thinking that it was a dream, or that it really existed and had an art critic. All of which is to say, I'm saddened to see this great part of Boston go. And as someone who's been part of two newspapers that died in recent years, my heart particularly goes out to those whose livelihoods are hurt by this.

That can be the only reason that advertisers are no longer advertising, at least based on the reason for ending the print edition. That a cab medallion is worth less would not impact the need for lawyers to represent taxi drivers, businesses that repair or clean taxis or the other services needed by taxi medallion owners and drivers. Just because the value of a medallion has gone down why would that result in lenders disappearing? That claim itself sounds dubious considering most medallions are owned by large companies. Just how many independent drivers actually buy their own medallions?

Perhaps the real reason for ending the print version is that advertisers simply don't see the advantage of advertising in general? Or they see other means of reaching their customers that sidestep this publication? The fact that the publication will remain as a web based publication suggests that the advertising revenue is the present but that perhaps the real goal to eliminate the cost of printed paper?

Even Computerworld, one of the last print version periodicals for general personal computing, ceased its print version and now exists only on the web. No one can argue that the personal computer industry has lost value. But they saw that the print versions are no longer viable.

The various pieces of the digital world: the Web and other digital delivery systems as the delivery vehicle, and computers and tablets as the medium for reading ("consuming") content, continue to subordinate and sometimes completely replace the older and well established technology of paper.