TO OUR READERS: There may or may not be an announcement in Wednesday's online edition, which may or may not affect how the site's updated later this month.
THANKS TO A KIND READER, I've finally obtained a few copies of Philadelphia's Metro, the only new big-city daily newspaper in the U.S. these days.
Can the city where the U.S. was born now facilitate the rebirth of a sleepy, slowly-but-inexorably declining print-news industry?
From the looks of things, maybe. Just maybe.
Metro is the first North American unit of a chain of identically titled and formatted tabloids. The chain started in Sweden and now has clones in a half-dozen European cities plus Santiago, Chile.
The concept is so utterly simple, it's a wonder nobody did it before. Metro is a free tabloid, put out five mornings a week. Most of its editions are entirely ad-supported. The Philly version also gets a partial subsidy from the regional transit authority, which had commissioned the chain to set up there and has made it the only paper available inside its bus and train stations.
The content: A controversy-reduced package of short items. Think of a USA Today, cut down to fit 24 tabloid pages (including seven pages of ads). There's color on every page, and a couple of staples in the spine for extra convenience.
What Metro doesn't have (besides a real website): No stock listings, no unsigned editorials, no want ads, no mealy-mouthed "analysis" pieces. Also no subscriptions, no home delivery, and no in-house printing plant (it's printed by a subcontractor out in the Jersey suburbs).
What Metro has: Over 100 short and short-short news items (world, national, local, business, sports, entertainment), a weather map, one two-page feature story, a page of TV listings, a few arts-and-events listings, a half-page of sports statistics, one local-commentary column (by a different writer each day of the week), a letters page, an easy syndicated crossword, and only two comic strips.
Because it's a freebie, Metro can be a small enterprise witha startup-size staff, without having to match the volume-for-your-quarters content value of the city's established two-paper monopoly, the Inquirer and Daily News. Because it's made from an established formula, it doesn't have to employ a lot of seasoned news hacks. Because it's short and convenient, it may attract readers who've not bothered with daily papers.
Could the formula work here? Most likely; especially once the Sound Transit commuter-rail system gets underway later this year.
But it wouldn't necessarily have to be a paper on the strict, bright-yet-bland Metro formula. It could be a paper with a little more personality, a little more local flavor to it.
Any cyber-zillionaires out there want to help start up such a paper? Let's talk.
TOMORROW: Real estate hyperinflation: Is the war already lost?
IN OTHER NEWS: Disneyland employees are finally being allowed to grow moustaches. This means if ol' Walt really was frozen (he's not), he could thaw out and legally work for his own theme park.
ELSEWHERE:
- "I am horrified, not only about the idea of growing breasts but by the kind of breasts I was growing...."
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