Newspaper Wars

The increasing dilemma of which newspaper
to read to and from dayjob by SWTrain these days
has become farcical. the Indy is a great read,
and as the journey is only c.14 minutes there
is just time to read a few business articles going
and other pages on the way home.

The Metro is offered free on the way in but
it sits passively in its sales bins and can
be taken or not. Excursions to the City
add the City AM as a less passive option
as it is handed out occasionally.

Going home is entirely different.
During the evening journey war rages between
the London Lite people and the London Paper folk
as to who can thrust what paper(s) into
your hands first. The precincts of Vauxhall
Bus Tube and SWT Station are full of competing
newspapers and their reps vying for the best pitches
to catch unsuspecting
commuters from, on all angles of the concourse.

Assuming
that the reps get paid to give the papers away,
the newspaper proprietors must be spending
a fortune on wages alone. Advertising in some
of the papers is a bit thin too atm.
Then when you have finally passed the
SWTrain section access gates, the poor old
Evening Standard vendor tries to sell you his
wares for 50p which must be an uphill struggle
for Assoc News as well.

As for their content:

Indy A+
Metro B-
CityAM B
LondonLite C+
The LondonPaper C
Evening Standard B++

The trouble with freebies imho is that
they appear to be aimed at the youth market.
The London Paper's layout is good but its content
is not so good. The London Lite is visa versa.

The real reservation I have however is that the
freebies by their very nature, will cause their readers
to get used to skimming rather than reading in depth.
Fine for short train journeys though.

I hate to think of the impact on global warming and
other green issues, of all these newspaper wars