The Free Metro Newspaper

Metro is the trading name of a free daily newspaper, published by Associated Newspapers (part of Daily Mail and General Trust) in the United Kingdom and Republic of Ireland. It is available from Monday to Friday each week on many public transport services across the United Kingdom and Ireland.

The paper was launched in London in 1999, and can now be found in 13 UK urban centres. Localised editions are distributed in Birmingham, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Leeds, Manchester, Liverpool, Newcastle, Sussex, Sheffield, The East Midlands, Bristol and Bath. A Dublin version, launched in conjunction with Metro International and The Irish Times, began publications on 10 October 2005. It is part of the same media group as The Daily Mail, The Mail on Sunday and the Evening Standard, although in some areas, the paper operates as a franchise with a local newspaper publisher, rather than as a wholly owned concern.

The website; ‘www.metro.co.uk’ is not only a place where obviously headline are displayed, just like any other respectful spreadsheet or even tabloid newspaper does but it is a place where interactivity is rife. It provides additional sections, including ‘weird stuff’ , ‘metrosexual’ and even blogs and podcasts.

The website strongly benefits from the strong base of the paper itself, they are distributed in various places (taking london for an example) on buses, tubes, trains & other forms of transport. When people wake up to commute to work, the metro along with other, less significant free London newspapers is what they encounter, being the most dominant & well known the reading of it becomes a daily ritual. There are sections that are divided just to suit the ‘average commuter’, or they can rely on the fact that they are so widespread in what they publish that anyone would have an interest in any particular section.

Issues are raised in the sometimes issued ‘Outrage?’ section, this involves them publishing a short story that can later on be commented on via the online blog room. Headings like ‘Chocolate Christ Sculpture’ which are designed to immediately catch the readers eye are often posted in this section. This section also displays another aspect of convergence as they allow the reader to text in on their mobile phone, maybe while on the way to work, school or wherever their place of work is. The newspapers publisher does everything to warm the reader to the newspaper to encourage them to use different medias to get involved.

The Metro are part of Daily Mail & General trust and although it is distributed as a free newspaper it does receive a lot of profit, solely due to the interactivity that is involved with it. The encouraged mass convergence leads to many texts & emails being sent in, competitions are involved also.

On the site many trailers, webzines & blogs are posted to correlate with what the reader of the metro may have read in the day, they can be saved & kept in a blog of the readers choice. Videos that readers have made themselves can also be posted on the site, even news videos that have been headlines in the newspapers. Even a man that killed his wife, then tried to hide in a hospital but was finally hosed out with a police hose. As it is a tabloid newspaper the website is open to advertisement also, including news on band concerts & films at the cinema at the current time.

Overall this website is a very good example of intractivity, as the newspaper is just something that was initially published to be a 20 minute read it has done very well for itself. People now, not only pick up and read the magazine but when they arrive home they comment on things they had seen earlier in the newspaper, post their thoughts and even videos recorded from their mobiles, which just shows the amount of convergence involved in the simple activity of reading a free tabloid newspaper