Free Newspapers

Origin

Various claims are made about the origin of the free daily newspaper. One source traces the format back to Australia at the turn of the twentieth century; another points to Contra Costa Times, founding publisher Dean Lesher's experiment with free newspapers in California during the early 1960s, as the progenitor. According to the California Newspaper Hall of Fame, Lesher's model delivered the paper to reader's homes for free but sought “voluntary” subscriptions to support the service. The Colorado Daily, a newspaper based in Boulder, whose own free format dates from the early 1970s, also claims to be one of the first outlets to publish under the advertising-only model. The more recent geographic expansion and readership growth of free newspapers was born of a gambit by Swedish publishers in 1995. Launched in Stockholm, Metro sought success based on the premise that subway riders would enjoy a free newspaper to accompany their daily commute; the approach was groundbreaking for integrating free distribution with mass transit structure. The paper achieved notable inroads with the youthful readers so desired by advertisers, saw broader growth that doubled the size of the still-comparatively slim publication, and posted an industry-leading $11 million in earnings within a decade. As one Swedish media analyst told Time magazine in 2000, “Metro has changed the newspaper reading patterns for Swedes…. It is all the young people read.”

The concept proliferated swiftly across Europe and more slowly elsewhere. Metro International introduced free daily newspapers in the late 1990s in Prague, Helsinki, Budapest, and Amsterdam. From their modern incarnation in 1995 with a circulation of 200,000, free newspapers grew to distribute more than 40 million copies daily by the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century, according to industry expert Piet Bakker. Although the format has taken hold in cities from [Page 649]Baltimore to Buenos Aires and Seoul to Singapore, Europe continues to be the region where most of the papers are located—Spain in particular has had a large concentration of free dailies. Metro International, based in Luxembourg, continues to dominate the bulk of the market as the world's largest publisher of free dailies. By 2008, the chain that distributes to New York, Boston, and Philadelphia in the United States claimed a daily circulation of 23 million copies in 23 countries around the globe. Traditional (paid) daily newspapers responded to the format upstart with several business and legal strategies. Free newspapers challenged their existing institutional model and raised concerns about eroding habitual readership and advertisers, though claims were often made (and some evidence found) that the free dailies capture a younger readership that was not using the more venerable outlets. Faced with potential competition nonetheless, the established market players could opt for confrontation, competition, or co-existence.

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