What is replacing them could prove to be a little bit more interesting....
CultureMap to take over Hudson News Shops at Houston Airports. Danielle Abril, Houston Business Journal
The CultureMap stands will similarly offer convenience items as well as concierge services, which will be powered by CultureMap content. This means customers will be able to see content about where to eat, shop and visit while they are in a specific city. All of the content will come from CultureMap.
I would imagine that the store-fronts themselves would be an improvement over the old Hudson News outlets (wouldn't take much). And while I'm slightly concerned that "(a)ll of the content will come from CultureMap" having concierge services at the airport could be a boon to travelers arriving at Houston.
One hopes that they stay away from the obvious click-bait trolling stories such as this and focus instead on their more straight-forward review reporting such as can be found here. The HBJ article did go on to say that CultureMap would be changing their reporting staff and methods on reporting some news, so hopefully this means more of the latter and less of the former going forward.
An ideal situation would be for CultureMap to supplement their own content with that from other publications through licensing agreements and other avenues. I realize that their goal is to increase their page hits but, if you really want to give visitors an overview of Houston, there are other news outlets that need to be included. Off hand I'd suggest that it would be journalistic malpractice to exclude the restaurant review section of the Houston Chronicle given that they pump out consistently better material than does CultureMap.
For Houstonians traveling through the HAS I doubt this is going to have much, if any, impact. One would guess that bottled water and sodas will still be overpriced, the snacks on offer will still be nutritionally suspect, and the magazine selection will continue to be abysmal. To be fair, there's little on offer at any airport in stores of this type.
This has the possibility of being an improvement for the HAS. Time will tell if CultureMap: Houston has the organizational chops to pull it off however. The overriding concern, as noted in the post title, that visitors come into the shop looking for a place to have a cocktail in Houston, and end up being directed to a slide-show titled "Best places in Houston to see some side-boob."
