Yesterday, the news broke that Starbucks will start offering free WiFi in the UK. They’re not the first – you can get free WiFi in Caffe Nero already, for example – but the content partnership model they’ve followed in the US suggests some intriguing possibilities for local news publishers:
> Now, if I were any one of the major regional newspaper groups, I would be beating a path to the door of Starbucks to offer my, say, TrinityMirror (Cardiff) content for the ‘portal’ that has just opened up every time I open up my lap-top in a Cardiff Starbucks.
> It’s a whole new way of finding your audience; that doesn’t involve them buying a copy of the local newspaper from the grizzled old vendor stood outside.
Any good reason why they shouldn’t follow Mr Waghorn’s suggestion?