Hooked on Kindle

By Chris Roush
June 17, 2008

I have seen the future of business journalism, and I can hold it in the palm of my hand.

OK, maybe it’s a little big bigger than the palm of my hand, but it has everything that a hardcore business news junkie like myself needs, and I find myself addicted to it.

No, it’s not a PalmPilot, or a BlackBerry, or even one of those cell phones with the keyboard that my 16-year-old son has so he can text his friends all day long.

It’s an Amazon Kindle.

The Kindle was released last year to great fanfare among book readers because it allows you to download more than 130,000 books. But my Father’s Day present has quickly turned into a something beside a book reader. It’s become how I keep in touch with what’s going on in business news during the day.

Alan Murray, executive editor of The Wall Street Journal Online, expressed shock last year when I told him I didn’t subscribe to the paper’s Web site. Well, Alan, I’ve done the next best thing. I am now a WSJ subscriber via Kindle. I can also get the latest business news from The New York Times, The Washington Post, Investor’s Business Daily and even West Coast papers such as the San Francisco Chronicle and The Seattle Times. The Kindle has Wi-Fi – as strong if not stronger than my laptop’s connection -- for constant updates.

But wait, there’s more. I’m also a business news blog junkie, and Kindle has subscriptions available to virtually all of the top business news blogs, including blogs from Reuters and the AP, not to mention The Motley Fool, Dealbreaker and The New York Times’ business reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin’s DealBook blog. Also, I can get tech and media blogs such as TechCrunch, GigaOm from Om Malik, PaidContent.org and All Things Digital.

I’m not forgetting the glossies. Kindle also has Fortune and Forbes, though I’m disappointed not to find BusinessWeek or its Web site.

The point to me telling you about the Kindle’s offerings is this: Increasingly, people want their business news when they want it, and frankly, reading biz news stories on a cell phone or a BlackBerry causes too much eye strain. But the Kindle screen is big and easy to read.

I’ve had the thing for a week, and I’m hooked, primarily because of the vast offerings that I had no idea about. (My wife bought it to cut down on the books piling up at home.) Plus, I see a revenue stream for struggling business publications and niche business blogs and Web sites. They can start charging more for a Kindle subscription, creating a money flow to combat what they’re losing in print.

Yeah, I know I can get all of these business publications on my laptop or my PC. But there are times when I’m not in front of my computer and I want to know what’s going on. Plus, my wife frowns when I take the laptop on vacations. But with the Kindle, I can tell her I’m reading a book, not checking Fortune’s cover story in the latest issue.

For business journalism, go Kindle, and enter the 21st century.

Copyright © 2008 Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism