I have to have a rant here. Not only is there the free Metro newspaper every morning, but now when you walk through London in the evening you're having London Lite and The London Paper thrust at you.
I've two issues here - it's more people getting in the way and more people day dreaming whilst reading when you're trying to get home; but more importantly for this site - what about the paper?
Yes, the papers may well be printed on recycled paper (or at least I hope they are as many newspapers have at least a high percentage of recycled pulp in them) but what about the disposal of these papers. I have a 20 minute walk through London each evening, and tonight I counted 1 paper recycling point, lots of newspapers shoved in bins and lots lying around at bus stops and on the ground. All of these extra papers (thousands of them) are just going into landfill. I wouldn't mind so much if the printers were providing recycling facilities, therefore completing the chain, but they aren't.
Does anyone know of any campaigns for this to take place?
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To put this into context - there are a couple of questions we need to ask:
1/ Why are these newspapers free?
The Metro newspaper in London originally started in Stockholm over a decade ago. Metro International now publishes free newspapers in over 20 countries across Europe, America and Asia.
Economically, they're able to give them away for free because the people who typically read them are young professionals during their commute, when most people tend to eek out as much from a paper as possible in order to make their journey less boring. This demographic have a high disposable income and the free papers are therefore able to sell advertising space for a premium, outweighing the cost of production and distribution.
Journalistically, they are able to give them away free because there is, or was, no competition. Local newspapers are free but uninsteresting. Mainstream newspapers are staid, out of date by the time they're printed and politically biased. The kind of people who read free newspapers are looking for a lightweight newspaper that doesn't challenge them and isn't pushing a covert agenda (if you accept that the only agenda in these newspapers is advertising).
However, there is a train of thought that suggests these free newspapers are there to protect paid for titles. Rather than allowing people to draw a comparison between the Metro newspaper and the Evening Standard, with the launch of London Lite we're now encouraged to draw comparisons between those two, making paid for newspapers less comparable.
2/ What happens to them?
It appears that 397,000 copies are handed out daily, from a print run of 405,000. Given that the free nature of these papers encourages a kind of recycling whereby passengers leave them on the train for other passengers to read, it's clear that no-one is throwing them away. Free newspapers are by definition disposable. This is where the real problem is - unlike paid for newspapers that incur a cost of transation, there is no end-point in the life-cycle of free newspapers. The Metro paper, which has a deal to be placed prominently in stations around London, is where we should look to see how the other free newpapers are going to act. Clearly, after several years, the train companies see no problem in absorbing the additional rubbish collection that comes with thousands of copies on unwanted newspapers on their trains. From my own daily experience I can tell you that free newspapers go into the same bin as every other piece of rubbish when the trains are cleaned at the end of each journey.
3/ What happens next?
What should happen next is positive action. The Govenrmnet should pass a law that forces free papers to be responsible for the resulting waste. Much like McDonalds received such bad press for the litter that would end up strewn in the vaccinity of their High Street restaurants, forcing them to create Litter Patrols to clean up after their customers, free newspapers should install recycling bins right next to the people who hand them out on station approaches.
However, what happens next is the same thing that has happened in Denmark. Inevitably, free newspapers in Denmark are now delivered directly to over half a million homes. If the advertisers are willing to pay for this, there's no reason why free newspapers in London aren't going to see the same kind of arms race, right up to your front door.
You can read a whole lot more about free newspapers in this interesting article from the Guardian G2:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,1878301,0...
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