At Four Seasons Hotel in DC, You Can't Fold Your Newspaper At Breakfast

Well, you may not be able to fold your morning paper, but the hotel is offering guests at breakfast in its restaurant something even better and more high tech.

Each guest at the Four Seasons Hotel in Washington, DC, receives a Kindle with which they can access newspapers from around the globe. So if you're visiting from Chicago, and you want to read every word in your hometown newspaper about the Bears or Bulls, the Kindle can deliver the paper right next to your orange juice.

And if there's some foreign paper that requires a fee for you to access it, the hotel will cover the cost.

As an aside, I will tell you that as a former newspaper guy (I was an investigative reporter and columnist at The Washington Post for 13 years out of college), I and my friends who are also in the print business have been lamenting for years now the decline in newspapers.  Both from a financial perspective as well as from the viewpoint of quality. With the mass migration of classified ads and other advertising (remember those big ads airlines used to run in major and not-so-major newspaper?) to the Internet, newspapers have had to lay off reporters, editors, and photographers.

I sometimes wonder what they're teaching journalism students at colleges these days, since it appeared the demise of the newspaper is drawing near.  But it's technology that is giving me some hope.  After all, if someday we all receive our news via reading devices like the Kindle, that frees news-gathering organizations from having to invest in expensive paper, trucks, and printing presses.  And the Kindle and new, competing devices are conditioning Americans to pay for subscriptions to newspapers and magazines.  At prices much cheaper than having a physical product delivered to your door each day.

And my buddy, Robert Stephens, who founded Geek Squad and sold to Best Buy, tells me, we're not far from a color Kindle and all kinds of additional, even more snazzy devices hitting the market.  We're not far from having Kindle-like devices that will be able to be rolled up just like a New York Post under your arm in a Manhattan subway.

So maybe good journalism will survive after all.  Much as I like blogs (and I'm writing one, obviously), I fear the loss of news-gathering organizations that have the time and money to do investigative reporting while attempting to be unbiased.  New technology that has so affected traditional newspaper and magazines (have you seen how thin Time and Newsweek are these days?) may wind up saving journalism.