DarrenBarefoot.com

My commute by bus is short enough to be served by this size of rag. I too noticed the heavy reliance on wire service content, and only noticed one or two bylines by staff when I went looking. It’s basically a print aggregator with no configuration, and it’s more portable than my laptop. The 16 pages make it pretty easy to juggle on the bus; a whole lot easier than the Post or the Sun. It’s convenient and totally disposable once it has served its purpose.

It doesn’t matter if they serve up RSS, or if they notice it; the majority of their content is re-blogging anyhow. If you don’t like the paper, you won’t like the feed, so no worries :)

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The Metro/Dose/dying newspapers debate is one I continue to have with one of my close friends who is a staunch ‘old media’ guy. He seems to think these papers will thrive. I’m less convinced. These papers are taking dead-aim at the tabloid papers ie, Vancouver Province, hence the reason why CanWest became a last-minute investor in Metro. I don’t see these offerings resonating well with the 30+ demo. I believe Metro is in fact gunning for this demo, while Dose goes for more of the youth market. Plus, Vancouver’s about to get another free paper as well which is scheduled to launch in less than a month from now which will be glossy paged and full-colour.

Truncated news/wire stories are a waste of pulp and paper, IMO. Bite-sized stories are fine, provided I can dig deeper if I want to. But print can’t compete with the depth of the web, so why waste my time snacking on a free paper, when I can get those same snacks on the web with the ability to satiate my appetite to dig deeper (at my own discretion, without it being force-fed to me) in ways that no paper can possibly offer.

Metro will get bigger. I believe they’re going for a 36-48 page format. But unless these papers start bringing to the table some very interesting editorial content, I won’t bother reading it unless I’m stuck in a Dr.’s office and it’s either Metro or Physicians Weekly.

But when it comes to newsprint, the prevailing feeling I’m left with, is that this is an industry clearly in decline and these latest offerings seem like the proverbial spaghetti noodle toss, hoping that something sticks in the demos they continue to see erode before their eyes. Stick it might, in the short term as we’ve seen in markets like Toronto, but the web-savvy echo generation have grown-up without reading much newsprint in addition to basically writing-off radio as a means for listening to music. I’m not claiming to have any hidden answers, but I don’t think newspapers are going to be able to overcome the undeniable physical limitations of their own medium for the long term. Daily newsprint won’t die, but I’m not convinced any of the spaghetti noodles being tossed against the wall now, are going to stick for the long haul. In my opinion, what I could see happening down the road once this ‘free paper’ trend plays itself out, is that newspapers start going more high-end, both in terms of content and presentation, catering specifically to those that love the medium, loosen the editorial noose, and charge more for it.

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Darren: I suppose you could be right on the RSS feed interest… There are people who I might read one post in 20 or even fewer.

I saw one letter to the editor in Metro that said something I really liked; that all newspapers should be free to the reader. I would imagine that home delivery subscriptions aren’t quite the moneymaker that they used to be anyway, and that the papers are making their real cash on ad sales. Imagine The Post going 100% free every issue at all skytrain stations and 7-11s in town…

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The Metro ads on the transit buses are driving my editorial mind mad.

“Lion’s defeat” should be “Lions defeat”, or if they do mean the possessive Lions’s or Lions’ defeat

What is that apostrophe doing?
sigh.

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