Nevertheless, the freesheet owned by The Daily Mail is still the most-read national newspaper in Britain today.
Almost one million people get a copy of the free tabloid daily. The time they spend reading it can range from seconds to minutes.
It is not because Metro is a newspaper. That’d be giving it too much credit.
It’s that Metro is a means of distraction, of filling up the dead space between one underground station and the next.
High-brow critics have long complained that the paper has little editorial substance. There are neither explosive scoops nor incisive comments.
This is true of Metro, but it misses the point.
The kind of consumer who would only read Metro for their news is the type of person who doesn’t read any news at all.
That demographic is part of a much bigger audience for non-linear, audio-visual media, for whom politics is the background rather than the foreground.
Knowing what’s happening in the world is good, but the details are too depressing to go deep.
If we need to know more, there’s always the BBC or Sky.
New Money, New Media
Metro was launched by the Daily Mail and General Trust (DMGT) in 1999. The paper is still owned by the DMGT today, albeit through a holding company, Associated Newspapers.
It was just before the Dot-com bubble burst, and print titles were already feeling the heat from online platforms.
Sweden inspired the freesheet tabloid. Metro International had established a network of freesheets in major cities worldwide, flourishing in this changing environment.
Mail executives even flew to Stockholm on a ‘fact-finding’ mission.
News International was reportedly considering launching a UK freemium paper then – but the DMGT struck first.
Within a few years, Rupert Murdoch was worried that the paper could be eating into The Sun’s readership.
After twenty years in the game, Metro made £1 million a month thanks to its freemium model.
If the paper earns less advertising revenue, it will run fewer pages. Profitability is the name of the game, no matter what.
Almost 60% of Metro readers are men working white-collar jobs. 53% are between 18 and 44 years old.
The average Metro reader was 39 in 2019. This is younger than most national papers, but it’s hardly a hit with TikTok teens.
Generation Z is likelier to tune into Novara Media than any national newspaper.
The print press has not kept up with digital platforms. Many Millennials and Zoomers do not bother to buy a paper because they get their news from Instagram and podcasts.
The readership demographics partly reflect the newspaper’s distribution strategy: train stations. Metro is effectively a paper for commuters.
The target readership is still young, aspirational professionals.
News International launched its own freemium tabloid, The London Paper, in 2006. Murdoch still wanted to compete with Metro, but this project would prove to be ill-fated.
Metro won the battle of the freesheets when The London Paper closed shop just three years later.
It looked like Metro was all triumphant, but then one of the oldest London newspapers adopted a similar model.
The London Standard (formerly the Evening Standard) was relaunched as a freemium title in October 2009.
Associated Newspapers had owned the Standard for many years but sold it to Russian billionaire Alexander Lebedev earlier that year.
Now, Metro had a new rival freesheet in London. Both newspapers targeted an affluent audience with purchasing power, but Metro continued to draw younger readers.
The London Standard has a long history and association with the Liberal wing of the Conservative Party, while Metro has no political connections (or aspirations for such links).
This is partly because of the freemium model. The Standard may have adopted this business strategy to change with the times, but Metro has always been about advertising revenue.
Today, Metro dwarfs the London Standard, but the old newspaper of West London Tories has not given up.
The Standard’s editors will no doubt remember the fate of past free papers. Surviving doesn’t get any easier.
The Form is the Content
Metro relies heavily on agency content for its news, drawing readers in with headline puns and celebrity pictures.
Unlike other UK tabloids, Metro is not a sleaze machine and does not commission anything approaching investigative journalism.
Despite this, Metro may be Britain’s most innocuous tabloid in some ways.
This is a low bar in a country where the tabloids have pumped sewerage into the public space for decades, but it is still noteworthy.
Some progressive liberals used to be paranoid about Metro. They feared that the free newspaper was a plot to colonise the minds of the young with right-wing content.
This turned out to be very far from the truth.
Yes, Metro may be owned by The Daily Mail, but it is a far more liberal paper. For a long time, it was the only paper you could see young people skimming on the tube.
This was back in the pre-iPhone era when print was more popular and less costly than today.
When it does get political, Metro doesn’t take risks on provocative content. It would never run content denying climate change, for example.
Quite the opposite, in fact. Metro’s headlines have talked up the threat of global boiling during heatwaves. Everyone loves nature, right?
The left tends to assume the tabloid form is why such papers are so awful. This is a reasonable suspicion because the form is the content and vice versa.
There is nothing inherently regressive about the tabloid as a newspaper genre.
The format was mastered by social democrats such as Hugh Cudlipp, the legendary editor of The Daily Mirror.
Tabloids are not really about the news or not just about the news. That’s why The Sun ran on football and soft porn for decades but now struggles to compete with online platforms.
By tabloid standards, Metro is safe and clean. It runs on celebrity gossip, occasional lifestyle articles, funny news and sports coverage. Its pages are full of wordplay and puns.
The Weird News section is my favourite part of Metro’s online edition. Like many readers, I find the serious news content I need elsewhere.
What Metro offers is hilarity without the shame attached to rightwing, lowbrow The Daily Star.
As a tabloid, Metro occupies the same language world as The Sun, without the right-wing smut.
However, the same fate as the rest of the print press awaits Metro. Its success is partly based on the fact that the readers can get the ‘extras’ they crave elsewhere.
This is why the decline of the national press is bad news for Metro, even if it just means the freesheet will outlive all its rivals.
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Photograph courtesy of Martin Deutsch. Published under a Creative Commons license.
