By: Sonora Slater, for The Dirt
Even in New York City these days, it can be a task to find a print copy of the New York Times.
Newsstands have largely been converted into sidewalk merchandise booths, and newsies have been replaced with people dressed in slightly off-brand character costumes. Digitally, you can be scrolling through the top headlines in a second, engrossed in live sports updates or mindlessly playing the Wordle to continue your thousand-day streak. But a real, actual hard copy? You may have to be intentional, choosing specific retailers that still prioritize print.
And yet in Davis, California, a hard copy of the Times—as well as a hard copy of The Sacramento Bee, The California Aggie, The Dirt, The Dirt, and dozens of popular and niche newspapers and magazines—can all be found in one, nearly 40-year-old downtown location: Newsbeat.
The store began in 1986 as a tiny 200-square-foot newsstand in the University Mall, now known as the Davis Collective. A year later, they moved to the second floor of Mansion Square, then to E Street, and finally to their current location on 3rd Street.3rd Street. By that point, however, the three women who built the business up from the small spot it once was were ready to retire—luckily, before they could dissolve Newsbeat entirely, Terence Lott purchased it.
“I had a little bit of money set aside for graduate school education, which I was never gonna use, so I put in a down payment,” Terence told The Dirttold The Dirt. “I was thinking I’d be there five, maybe ten years.”
But when the director for a choir that both Terence and Janis Lott sang in paired them up for a duet—not-so-subtly playing matchmaker, as they later discovered—they fell in love, got married, and together, renewed their commitment to continuing Newsbeat’s legacy.
“I thought, one store for one person, we need another store—two people, two stores,” Terence said. “So we made a plan within the first six months of our marriage to start the second store in Sacramento.”
The second location was open for about 20 years, and through their temporary foray into franchising, they learned a lot about the mechanisms of keeping a print store alive despite both a waning supply and demand of daily newspapers. Namely: stocking cards, gifts, and other trinkets to draw in a larger crowd.
As the shop has changed, the longtime owners have watched the town around them change, too.
“In the first 10 years, I got to know every business owner,” Terence said. “And slowly but surely, they’ve been taken over by some sort of corporate franchise. That feels really difficult.”
When possible, Terence and Janis still work hard to build relationships with fellow business owners, as well as customers. And despite the additions, and other changes in Davis, Newsbeat is still, at its core, a haven for print media.
“There are people who literally drive the Causeway every Sunday because they want to come here to get their Sunday papers,” Janis said. “They want an adventure, and they want to see what else is new. Some get beautiful publications that they can’t find anywhere else.”
Although Janis says “curating” doesn’t feel to her like quite the right word for what she does, it certainly takes a specific discerning talent to select a supply of magazines that’s eccentric enough to help the shop’s stock stand out, but also commonly interesting enough to turn into profitable sales. As Janis spends time looking through what’s available and making her decisions, she’s seen the evolution, and in some cases, slow death, of print media throughout the country.
“It’s a little bit of a bubble here in Davis, and we have a lot of people who love print, so we would always be able to sell enough to justify having magazines,” Janis said. “But the reality is, it’s not about what we in Davis can sell. It’s about what people will buy in Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York. So the magazines may go away whether we want them to or not. It’s kind of a diminishing resource that we should treasure while we’ve got it.”
When print survives, Janis and Terence say it’s because it adapted, just like Newsbeat has by diversifying their stock over the years. Already, they’ve seen shifts away from twice-daily thin papers, and toward high-quality, glossy paged magazines with beautiful photos and deeply researched articles.
Beyond the fluctuating trends, Janis says some people don’t even come to Newsbeat for a specific publication—they treat it as a third space.
“A key component with print is people who are interesting, intelligent, they read, and they want to know about things,” Janis said. “They love coming to the store, and love chit chatting and hanging out and catching up, I think that people are craving that, and Newsbeat fills in a little bit of the gap of a place to just kind of lose track of time, and you see the little things.”
Although national trends do matter, the continued success of Newsbeat reflects the power that the support of a small town can have on keeping a small business alive.
“So many people from all over the country come in and say, ‘I wish we had this in my town,’” Terence said. But franchising again isn’t in the cards for them.
“We’ve done two stores before,” Janis said. “We’re really past our prime on that. But down the road, you never know what people will do.”
The way Janis and Terence put it, the continued existence and power of Newsbeat—and of every newspaper and magazine they still carry—sounds a little bit like magic.
“There is a Tinker Bell quality to [print media], you know?” Terence said. “If enough people believe in it, it will survive.”
