starbucks[1] CNet’s Caroline McCarthy has a piece looking at Starbucks’s new web hub, which it unveiled yesterday. The Starbucks Digital Network will only be accessible from the wifi networks within Starbucks stores, and will serve as “the digital version of the community corkboard,” according to Starbucks exec Adam Brotman.

But McCarthy notes it might be more apt to call this network a “digital newspaper”, as it takes the place of the stack of papers stores used to have next to the cash register but consumers have effectively stopped noticing. The network will content from various technology partners, most notably local and mainstream news customized to each given store’s neighborhood.

The content on the Starbucks Digital Network is carefully selected to be of interest to coffee-shop-goers: local information, downloadable music, quick bites of news and video. This ties into something that has always been true but conceptually hasn’t been feasible for a media company to address until our current age of mobile devices and ubiquitous Wi-Fi: that consumer choice in news consumption may depend not solely on personal interest or geographic location but on a far more immediate notion of when and where. Restricting access to the Starbucks Digital Network to company-operated stores can give them an idea of just who’s reading and what they might want to read. They’re not at home. They’re not at the office. They probably aren’t sticking around for more than a few minutes.

While I’m not sure I’d go so far as to call Starbucks “the true savior of publishing” as Joanna did, it’s nonetheless interesting to consider that any chain offering free Internet service in its franchises could go this route if it was willing to put in the time and effort, customizing its content to its particular clientele. There might be a lot more store-centric “digital newspapers” in our future.

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