Why Metro is still worth celebrating

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/feb/15/free-newspaper-metro-success-story

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This week’s prime exhibit: a national newspaper with something special to crow about. Around 1,346,000 Brits pick it up every weekday, which makes it the third-biggest daily in the land (behind the Sun and the Mail). You could shoehorn all but a few thousand copies of the Times, Telegraph, Guardian, FT and Independent rolled together into its pot. According to the latest National Readership Survey, it has 3,250,000 readers, 1.1 million of them ABC1s under 40: ad world’s most desirable targets. Gross revenue last year: £120m. Advertising acreage per page: No 1 in the land. And profitability probably somewhere north of £10m a year.

So why aren’t these amazing results celebrated come awards time? Why don’t academic theses on the death of old Fleet Street factor in totally counterintuitive success stories like this? The easy answer, of course, is that the Metro – in box stands outside rail, tube and bus stations – is free. No one, remember, makes much of a future fuss about news without price. Free barely seems to count.

Which is, on examination, slightly ridiculous. The Daily Mail group is the major owner of Metro – the Mail that is pavilioned in industry praise when its unique browser totals top 200 million a month. Those are free too, though: symbols of apparently emerging victory in the great online debate about open access or paywall. So what’s the difference between two advertising-dominant business models, one printed on dead forests, the other spanning the globe at the click of a button?

Of course you can push parallels too far. Of course there are other influences at play. But it is sensible to look at what has happened in the 15 years since a bunch of Swedes with a bright free newspaper formula to peddle arrived in Britain – and prompted the Mail group to get its retaliation, its own Metro, in first. We’ve seen pulsating free newspaper wars and the streets of London strewn with the sweat-stained detritus of defeat (mostly for Rupert Murdoch). We’ve seen the invading Vikings desert Europe to try their luck in South America. We’ve seen millions of pounds lost in the teeth of world economic crisis.

But we can, to this day, also see one London evening paper, the Standard, churning out 877,532 free copies a day, roughly three times as many as the paid-for version could boast at the nadir of its fortunes, and at last yielding a modest return to reward the Lebedevs for taking over where the Mail had, for once, conspicuously failed. The Standard, free but notionally good enough to command a cover price, shows what works. So, in many similar ways, does the Metro.

The Swedes, when they struck gold in the 1990s, didn’t think free should be cheap, thin and tatty. They wanted something brisk, newsy, professional and young in appeal. The non-Scandinavian Metro that defeated them remains true to that formula. It’s a chunky tabloid, sometimes 120 pages. It is brisk and businesslike, with few airs and graces: but it tends to lead the front page on a mainstream story (like Syriza’s election win or more carnage in the Middle East) rather than the celebrity tales the paid-for red-tops have specialised in for almost two decades now.

Metro employs about 65 journalists, serving 11 city hubs (including 120,000 copies printed in Scotland). It would be wrong to portray it as some kind of glowing, crusading achievement, but it clearly hits a market spot, and it clearly understands that this market – particularly young people – wants the main news of the world ordered and weighed every morning. Important matters. (Think Vice or Vox for a similar digital success formula. Celebrity is only half of the story, as the red-tops haven’t quite twigged yet.)

Metro has built-in advantages, to be sure. You can’t compete with smartphones on the tube or rattling under railway bridges. But it also demonstrates that a lot of readers, a lot of the time, are willing to pick up pages and spend 20 minutes or so getting a different news grip, delivered at a different, edited speed. It is, for now, part of the media landscape.

There’s no better reality check on the march of digital and the retreat of print than the Daily Mail’s own figures. Last quarter of 2014: digital ads up £3m to £18m; print ads down 10% to £48m. So print is still 2.6 times more than online (on one of the biggest, fastest-growing newspaper websites in the world). Compare this with the New York Times: digital ads up 19.3%, print ad revenue down 9.2%.

Uncanny closeness. Just like the decline in paid-for circulations (from January ABCs): the Telegraph down 9.16% in a year, the Guardian 10.8%. Sometimes you can discern evident transition, with unique online visitors rising. But often the money involved runs too far behind, and the cover price keeps on taking the strain. Calculations by UK Press Gazette a few months ago showed that, in broad terms, national papers had doubled in price over the past decade, and simultaneously offered the punter rather fewer pages of reading. More for less – not a conventional recipe for growth and revival perhaps, with Metro and the Standard poised to pick up the slack. For price, surely, also has a role to play in the dissonant saga of change.