Freesheets

This week two freesheets, Metro and Herald Am arrived on the media scene.  

We journalists are prone to hyperbole and linguistic imprecision even at the best of times. We're especially liable to spot a "rich irony" where lesser mortals would see a mere poor coincidence.

Admitting that, Meejit still reckons there is at least middle-income irony to be found in recent events in and around The Irish Times. In the same week that an ex-Times man was honoured by the literary elite as a master of fiction (prompting warm pleasure among his former colleagues), and the ex-editor had extracts of his high-minded memoirs published in the paper (prompting cynical eyebrow-raising among his former underlings), the frankly and baldly commercial freesheet Metro was launched from the Irish Times presses.

Freesheets are nothing new in Dublin, not even for The Irish Times – which produced a free paper for leafy southside districts for many years. However, compared to the stuff that gets shoved through your letter-box, the new, sharp-looking 40-page daily (and even the dowdier 32-pager that is the O'Reilly empire's spoiler, Herald AM) is a novel piece of news. Metro is such a plausible "real" newspaper that it lays bare the business model that underlies much of the periodical industry, with all its pretensions.

You don't need an MBA to understand that the cover price of a newspaper, like the relationship it consecrates between reader and publication, is not, fundamentally, what makes it tick. Only a fraction of that cash goes back to the paper anyway, and welcome though it is, in a "quality" newspaper it's only a minority of the revenue.

The acquisition of readers, of the right sort, is more important for advertising purposes than it is for direct income. Commercial media are in the business, primarily, of selling access to their audiences. Advertisers will pay more depending not only on the size of that audience, but on its socio-economic status: thus the cost of an ad in The Irish Times is out of keeping with the paper's position in the circulation league table. Maintaining its high penetration of the upper-income market is at least as important as maintaining circulation.

Indeed, it would be a waste of paper and ink for the paper to attract too many of the "wrong" readers. In this context, the €1.50 you pay for your morning paper can be seen as, in part, a useful, albeit modest, barrier to entry: by crossing the barrier the reader demonstrates that she/he is committed to reading the paper, turning over its pages and seeing the advertising it carries. However many copies of a freesheet are printed, there is no similar marker of reader commitment – as the new phenomenon of newspapers, Metro and Herald AM, left lying in public places all around Dublin demonstrates. (Already CIE and the Luas people have complained of the extra clean-up.)

Metro has already demonstrated in other locations that it can overcome advertiser scepticism through sheer weight of printed numbers as well as prima facie evidence of quality – at least enough quality to ensure plenty of 20-minute flick-throughs, plus puzzle-time. Metro readers who are used to the Irish Independent or Irish Times or even the Evening Herald will notice its relative shortage of analysis and opinion, and a lack of interest in political stories (though this last category grew after the first few days); "scoops" are not an obvious priority; but Metro's mostly light mix of news, entertainment and sport won't discommode readers of other paid-for papers.

The freesheets pose a potentially mortal threat to urban-based mid-market papers – eg the Herald here, the Evening Standard in London. Independent News and Media is fighting back with three weapons – Herald AM, the paid-for Herald and the aggressively tabloidised Irish Independent – and that's before one of Metro's parents, Associated Newspapers, launches an Irish Daily Mail here.

There's another rich irony, or poor coincidence at least: the Independent papers were essentially born a century ago as William Martin Murphy's blatant imitation of the Daily Mail. Now, with The Irish Times in tow, the empire strikes back.