Newspapers: there is money in "free"

The rapid growth of free newspapers in European (and, for now to a lesser extent, American) cities is one of the most interesting phenomena in recent publishing history.

Free dailies - from CityAM in London to 20Minuten in Zurich - have become a fixture of subway and train stations and bus hubs busy with commuters. Piet Bakker, an associate prof of communications at the University of Amsterdam, keeps track of their development on his website and lists 100 freesheets in Europe, about 60 in the Americas and 20 in Asia-Pacific. Just one group, Sweden's Metro, which started out in 1995 with a single paper in Stockholm, publishes now 69 editions in 21 countries worldwide. Bakker estimates that 27 million copies of free newspapers are distributed daily in 39 countries. Consider these statistics (from the World Association of Newspapers):

• Spain: 4.8 million copies of free newspapers out of a total national daily circulation of 9 million (share of freesheets: 53%)
• Portugal: 0.3 out of 0.8 (33%)
• Denmark: 0.6 out of 1.9 (31%)
• Switzerland: 1.1 out of 3.5 (31%)
• Italy: 2.3 out of 8 (29%)
• France: 1.8 out of 9.6 (19%)
• Poland: 0.6 out of 4.9 (11%)
• Netherlands: 0.5 out of 4.4 (11%)
• Britain: 1.2 out of 17.7 (7%)
• USA: 2.8 out of 56.2 (5%)

The development of "free printed news" shows no sign of slowing down, and may be hitting a new stage. According to a long article in the International Herald Tribune, established publishers of paid-for dailies, which so far had started some free editions on their own mainly for defensive reasons (sometimes successfully fending out the upstarts, like in Germany), are now starting to see free dailies as possible sources of profits that could compensate their declining paid-for circulations.

"Almost all over Europe, you see circulation going down for paid papers", Bakker told the IHT (this is not only a European trend: in the US, circulation peaked in 1987 and has been declining ever since, losing more than 2.5% so far this year). "At the same time, the economy is improving, helping the advertising market; free newspapers are seen as the best way to take advantage of this".

As said above, many have already acted. In Switzerland, where I live, 20Minuten has been bought by TAMedia, owner of a large daily; Ringier, publisher of the largest-circulation tabloid, just launched Heute, a free evening sheet, and is planning another one, focused on business and financial news; and Edipresse, the largest newspaper publisher in the French-speaking part of the country, has his own freebie, Le Matin Bleu. The movement seems to be accelerating. On his site Bakker lists 13 free newspapers launched across Europe just in the four months between 3 April and 7 August 2006. And many other projects are underway: News International in London said it will launch an afternoon daily, thelondonpaper, in September; Le Monde and Le Figaro in Paris are both rumored to have drawn up plans for freesheets; in Denmark, a new paper will soon be delivered to doorsteps (in Washington and San Francisco the Examiner is already delivered that way); and so on.

Other players are jumping on board. Iberia, the Spanish airline, gives passengers its own inflight freesheet, IB Universal, produced by its own editorial staff - and full of advertisement, of course.

The freesheet phenomenon is subverting the economics of newspublishing. In order to be profitable, they have to keep editorial costs to a minimum - around 10% of their spending compared with 20-40% for conventional newspapers. At the same time, a group like Metro can offer advertisers a huge, 100% urban international footprint (this is very relevant in Europe, where newspublishing markets have so far been extremely fragmented and consequently "protected"). They are also subverting the traditional editorial mix, by focusing strongly on news, sports and entertainment, with short factual stories and plenty of photos and graphics and smart use of the Internet, and in most cases practically no analysis, commentary, features or distant field reporting, and very little politics. In one case (France's DirectSoir) the approach is even lighter, focusing on entertainment and nightlife. And they are changing even the format of the newspaper: freesheets are mostly tabloid or compact format, and in the last couple of years we've seen the rapid reformatting of many traditional broadsheet newspapers (the Guardian and the Independent in the UK, for example, or Le Matin in Switzerland, and others in Ireland, Sweden, or the Netherlands) into compact products. 

Every time I visit a different city I pick up the free dailies, and I have to say that most of them are great editorial products. Small in format, they are often brilliantly laid out, with an air of freshness and clarity that most classic newspapers lack. Despite the shortness of a typical article, they manage to offer all the relevant news - or at least to give the reader the impression that (s)he's not missing out on anything important - plus many others that don't find space in conventional papers because they are not considered "newsworthy": service info, clubbing and entertainment, gossip, online curiosities and happenings, reader-submitted stories. Most of all, many of the freesheets do not shy away from writing about that scarecrow of many traditional newsrooms: products and commerce. It always amazes me how a gigantic pan of our daily life is fenced out of most traditional newspapers because "it would constitute free advertisement": we buy clothes, use cell phones and cameras and tons of other gadgets, go to restaurants, play videogames, want to be informed if a new grocer opens in the neighborhood or a new Apple store opens in town or a new route is opened by a low-cost airline, but most of this stuff never shows up in the editorial pages of most dailies, or only within specific columns. Books and movies and music pass muster because they're "culture", but cell phones apparently aren't, and "serious" newsrooms want Nokia and Samsung to appear only in the ad pages. Free newspapers don't care about this: they know that most of us spend more time using our cell phones than going to movie theatres, and when a new cool model comes out, they deem it newsworthy. In this sense, free dailies are way more modern and in tune with the times than most traditional newspapers.