Goodbye to an icon
Thursday, December 18, 2008 by Dave Winer.
Doc Searls writes that Out Of Town News on Harvard Sq in Cambridge is going out of business on January 1. 
There are efforts to revive it as a print-on-demand business, but come on, that's not going to work.
I think at some point you have to take a picture, have a ceremony, put up a plaque and let it go.
When I was a student in New Orleans in the 70s, I used to take the streetcar down to the Quarter every Tuesday to get the Sunday NY Times and sit by the river if the weather was good and catch up on the news from the world outside the bayou.
I imagine that's the function this news stand used to play for students in Cambridge of the same period. The stuff of stories, but it clearly not part of anyone's future.
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Dave Winer, 53, pioneered the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software; former contributing editor at Wired Magazine, research fellow at Harvard Law School, entrepreneur, and investor in web media companies. A native New Yorker, he received a Master's in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, a Bachelor's in Mathematics from Tulane University and currently lives in Berkeley, California.
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