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Helsinki Edition
October 1998
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Are free sheets the future of news?
"Quality - accessibility - price." This, according to editor-in-chief Sakari Pitkänen, is the basis for the free tabloid Metro's success. The cost is certainly reasonable, and the public transportation-based distribution makes it easy to find. But when it comes to quality, opinions differ.
Metro's production resources are cut to a minimum. The paper generally offers only news-bureau summaries, and no in-depth coverage.
The Stockholm edition's whole newsroom staff consists of about twenty people. The advertising department employs thirty more. The paper relies heavily on freelance material, buying columns and occasional feature articles. This contrasts to Dagens Nyheter (DN), Sweden's major broadsheet paper. In 1996, DN employed around 800 people.
Now Metro, this mean, lean, selling machine, is continuing its crusade across Europe. So far it has successfully challenged big-budget papers in Sweden, the Czech Republic and Hungary. In many other countries, for instance Finland and Holland, the thought of low-cost tabloids is also gaining a foothold. Some time ago the Tilburg academy of journalism was commissioned by the regional broadsheet Rotterdams Dagblad to investigate the market for a quality tabloid.
"Today there are no tabloid newspapers in Holland, only broadsheets.", says Kees Haak, journalist and teacher at Tilburg. "There the concept of tabloids is intimately connected to sensationalism, when in reality it's just a newspaper format with a bad reputation."
Kees Haak welcomes the thought of low-cost quality tabloids. Perhaps they are even a necessity, in an age where on-line advertising is replacing traditional means, stripping the papers of a great deal of income. But his opinion of Metro isn't entirely positive.
"Looking through the eyes of the publisher, I can see they've done a good job with the paper. But as myself, reading a paper like Metro, I soon start longing for a good broadsheet."
In his opinion, the ideal low-cost paper is more diverse, striking a balance between between accessibility and depth.
"Not Metro, not Bild-Zeitung, not The Sun. But also not too highbrow. Just a good, well thought out newspaper. It is difficult to make analysis for everyone. But if the writers are good enough it can work."
He considers the French Info-Matin an excellent example of this. Yet the paper failed. Why?
"They were only given two years to break even."
And in a way, that's symbolic. Today's newspaper is, above all, a commercial product, run for profit like any other company. If this development continues, is there a future for investigative reporting, and other forms of writing that require much research and a flexible budget? According to Kees Haak, the answer may lie in idealism, in the old image of the journalist as communicator, not craftsman.
"It's the task of every journalist to do investigative reporting, in his spare-time if necessary. Any reporter who says he cannot spare half an hour a day for this, is a liar", he says.
That is, if some of the fire and conviction remains in tomorrow's journalists, even after their first contacts with the cold, cruel world of real-life newspaper making.
Mattias Källman |
