The Daily News was closed on Monday. While the suddenness of the event was shocking, with no final edition printed, it was plain to see why it happened, once the circulation stats were reported. The News only had 16,000 subscribers, versus over 100,000 for the Herald. To be fair, the News is mainly a Halifax paper, while the Herald has both metro and provincial editions. Anyway, the paper was losing millions of dollars, so what better way to solve that problem than to start putting out a free paper!?!
The company that owned the News has started producing a new tabloid, called Metro. There are a number of other cities in Canada that already have this paper, so the owners must think it will succeed here too, although a not-free paper that actually had local news stories and real reporters had failed.
I picked up the first Metro paper yesterday, just to see it. Wow, it is great for the vision-impaired! The font is the largest I have seen in a newspaper, with all sorts of white space between lines, wide margins, etc. I guess they have to somehow fill up the pages that aren’t full-page ads. I really dislike the sans-serif headline font.
The stories take about 30 seconds or less to read, which makes me feel like I am watching TV, instead of reading a “newspaper”. I was surprised to actually see current news stories as well as a few local items, but as I foretold, the paper was heavy with ads and downloaded fluff from national news providers. This will probably be the only copy of Metro that I ever pick up, unless one of my kids has a papier-mache project for school.
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