People sit on a stairway in Arat Kilo, Ethiopia, reading newspapers they rent for about 6 cents per half hour.
It’s a crowded afternoon in Arat Kilo, a busy section of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. A line of men stoop on the sidewalk to shine shoes with rags and buckets of brown, soapy water. Kids hawk gum and packets of tissue. Minibuses squeal as they grind to a halt, fill up and start off again.
Vendors shout at passersby, selling everything from carved wooden crosses to cell phone air time. Taxis honk at potential customers.
But in a narrow stairwell, situated slightly back from the street noise and chaos, a crowd is completely silent.
They are busy reading newspapers.
None of the readers have actually purchased the news. Rather, they are renting it from “paper landlords.”
Here in Ethiopia, most households do not have access to TV sets or computers. Internet cafes are also cost-prohibitive, charging as much as $1-$2 per hour. That makes the newspaper the most economical and efficient way to get a headline fix.
Still, the papers here cost between 3 and 6 birr — or 18 to 36 cents.
On the other hand, renting a paper for a half hour is just 1 birr, about 6 cents.
Many avid readers are too poor to purchase the news every day, but they can manage to rent one. The staircase in Arat Kilo is just one of many newspaper rental locations throughout the bustling, crowded capital city.
The rental stoops also create an active social environment, a place where people swap opinions and stories. On a busy Saturday afternoon, conversation quickly turned into a heated discussion about the uprising in Libya and the future of South Sudan.
The readers are a demographic that most print publications in the United States covet. They are young and educated, and they are hungry for headlines.
In return, the African newspapers give readers what they want, including long-form narratives, analysis of current events and entertainment.
Here print is not dead — it reigns supreme.
Thomas Birru, a 23-year-old student from Shashemene, said newspaper rental is the only affordable way to learn about the world. Books are pricey and often not up-to-date, he said. Magazines are expensive, difficult to find and not necessarily relevant to his life.
“Newspapers are the only way to know what is happening, but they can be too expensive to buy every day,” Birru said. “One newspaper costs as much as a bus ride across town, and I cannot afford that.”
So he rents his news, one half-hour at a time.
The papers go through dozens, if not hundreds of hands, before they are recycled by local merchants who use it as food wrap, toilet tissue or scrap for the fire.