free newspapers
Free newspapers are fully financed through advertising and are, therefore, available for audiences free of charge. Although often perceived of as low-quality substitutes for proper newspapers, free newspapers became hugely popular in the 2000s. This type of newspaper has, however, experienced dramatic decreases in circulation and readership as well as the number of titles with the increased popularity of online media and mobile devices. This entry discusses the business model of free newspapers, their quality, and their history and development.
Business Model
In the first instance, it is the business model that distinguishes free newspapers from other types of newspapers as it deviates slightly (but on an important point) from the standard business model.
In the most elementary form, commercial media operate in a dual market and produce content using two sorts of revenues. Commercial media both sell content to audiences and sell the attention of audiences to advertisers, which expose their messages to the people consuming the media. (Numerous other types of revenue streams exist, but sales to end users and advertisers are the most important.) Advertisers’ contributions mean that audiences only have to pay a minor share of the costs of producing media.
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In the case of free newspapers, however, this two-sided revenue model is reduced to a one-sided one: Free newspapers do not get revenues directly from audiences but rely only on payments from advertisers. In this way, the basic economic structure of free newspapers resembles that of commercial radio and television in the United States. As a result of the business model, a widespread perception among elites and opinion leaders has been that free newspapers are of low journalistic quality.
Free Newspapers and Quality
Journalistic production is expensive, and in order to keep expenses down, many free newspapers are inclined to limit the use of original reporting and instead rely on material from news agencies, wire services, and social media. This type of content is also widely published by other types of newspapers, but it takes a more prominent position in free newspapers and only rarely represents quality above the average. In addition, since free newspapers do not have audience fees from which to draw revenue, they must succeed in attracting enough advertisements to finance news production. To do so, it is necessary to draw as many readers as possible.
As John H. McManus has explained with reference to commercial television, economic theory has it that there is no or only limited pecuniary gains connected with investing more resources in journalism than the bare minimum necessary to maintain an audience that is appealing to advertisers. So, the journalistic effort is calibrated to best balance low-cost production with the basic requirements for building and maintaining large audiences. However, while commercial considerations subdue journalistic ambitions for many free newspapers (and are believed to do so more often than for other types of newspapers), several free newspapers around the globe have been recognized as quality newspapers.
A prominent case of a quality free newspaper is found in Iceland, where free Fréttablaðið (founded in 2001) is the dominant national newspaper with the largest circulation and a general reputation of delivering solid news coverage. (In 2006, Fréttablaðið’s then owner Baugur attempted to export the concept to Denmark in the form of Nyhedsavisen. Nyhedsavisen, however, closed after only two years and put an end to further expansionist inclinations.) In the United States, high-quality free newspapers exist. Notable examples include Willamette Week (published in Portland, Oregon) and The Stranger (Seattle, Washington), both of which have won Pulitzer Prizes.
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Free newspapers could also be considered of societal value because of their readership. Free newspapers have proven good at reaching audiences that otherwise do not read newspapers, in particular young people and resource-weak groups of society (e.g., people with low incomes or less education). This way, free newspapers have been instrumental in including new parts of the population in the community of newspaper readers. As newspaper readership has consistently been found to increase political knowledge and engagement, and because of the increasingly inclusive public sphere that follows from that, this is a development that can have positive democratic consequences.
History and Development
The concept of free newspapers goes back more than a century. It started with the Manly Daily, a community newspaper published in the Sydney Metropolitan Area since 1906, and reached the United States in the form of the weekly Contra Costa Times, which was founded in 1947 in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 1971, the student newspaper the Colorado Daily developed into a free community newspaper in Boulder, Colorado, pioneering this type of newspaper in an American context, and more free newspapers appeared in the same state throughout the 1980s and 1990s. In the early 21st century some 50 free newspapers are published in the United States in more than 70 editions.
From an institutional point of view, the initiative with the most far-reaching implications for the development of free newspapers started in February 1995, in Sweden. There, journalists Pelle Andersson, Robert Braunerhielm, and Monica Lindstedt launched the free commuter newspaper Metro in the capital, Stockholm, with financial support from the Kinnevik investment company.
Although not revolutionary in itself, the concept of Metro was simple and economically sound: The newspaper, financed through advertising, was handed out (or available on racks) at train stations and bus stops in order to target people who used the public transportation system and could use something to occupy themselves with during the commute to work or school. The newspaper was written and structured in a way that could be read through in 25 minutes. This way, the newspaper was tailored specifically for audiences with idle time on their hands and distributed in such a way that it reached them in large numbers.
Since this launch, the company’s operations have spread rapidly and successfully across borders, and Metro International soon became the leading actor in the business of free newspapers. In 2015, 20 years after the first copies were handed out in Stockholm, the company published 72 editions (some in partnerships with other publishers) in 24 countries across the Americas, Asia, and Europe, reaching almost 18.3 million daily readers.
The many editions of Metro International’s free newspapers constitute a highly uniform body as they share design, sectioning, and content produced by renowned journalists or correspondents, and as they have, on occasion, had celebrities act as global guest editors-in-chief for one day (e.g., pop singer Lady Gaga on May 17, 2011; fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld on February 7, 2012, and entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson on October 4, 2012). Also, all the free newspapers go by the title Metro, except for a few national editions; in order to avoid trademark violations, the Danish version, for example, was called Metroxpress and the Peruvian, Chilean, and Mexican ones Publimetro.
At a point in press history where pressure intensified on the printed newspaper, the wide proliferation of free newspapers beginning around 2000 slowed the rapid decrease in circulation figures for the news industry. The spread and popularity of free newspapers have decreased in recent years after the number of published titles peaked in 2008, however. Because of free newspapers’ reliance on advertising solely, the international financial crisis in the years around 2010 hit them harder than other types of news media.
During the Great Recession, the free newspaper industry experienced numerous closures across the globe. Europe in particular has experienced this development as over half of the European free newspapers that existed in 2008 were closed five years later. This particular development is likely due to an oversaturation of the market, for as Piet Bakker has demonstrated, many free newspapers closed in previously competitive markets and left natural monopolies in the free newspaper markets with only one title published.
Furthermore, the decreasing proliferation of free newspapers is—especially in Western countries—in all likelihood caused by the spread of mobile devices with ubiquitous Internet connections, which have given commuters and other media users access to other types of media content, games, and communication on the go.
The original version of this article was published by SAGE Publications in The SAGE International Encyclopedia of Mass Media and Society.