New York Times coming to coffee shop screens

850 coffee shops, casual eateries, and airport newsstands to display NYT content via RMG partnership

About 850 video screens in the main business districts of San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Boston will start showing New York Times content, as part of a new deal between the newspaper company and RMG Networks, which operates tens of thousands of these out-of-home screens.

Running on 14-minute loops, the presentation will consist of an article on the left side of the screen supplemented by pictures and videos on the right side. Both content and ads will sometimes be location-specific, and smartphone owners will be able to access extra content through their phones, like coupons for the business they happen to be at.

The screens are typically found in coffee shops, casual eateries, and airport newsstands.

Yasmin Namini, the Times’s senior vice president for circulation and marketing, believes the new partnership with RMG to be "a good branding opportunity for NYTimes.com."

It's common knowledge that the news industry desperately needs new readers to stay afloat.

While, in the years to come, it will probably become more and more commonplace for people to simply read the news on their mobile devices, right now there are a lot of people out there without such devices; this deal is aimed at exactly that market. People spend a lot time standing in line or just waiting for their order, and now they can spend that time getting their news from a screen in the establishment.

Over the next few months, RMG will bring the New York Times to another 850 screens, some possible in different cities than the one listed above.