It was on an unremarkable day, more than 10 years ago, that newspaper executives Jonathan Harmsworth and Murdoch MacLennan slipped out of the Daily Mail & General Trust's imposing Derry Street headquarters in Kensington and flew to Stockholm. Their fact-finding mission was quickly judged a success. "They came back really impressed by young commuters reading a newspaper, rather than staring into space," says Steve Auckland, managing director of the company's free newspapers division. The result of that Swedish visit would, it is no exaggeration to say, change the face of Fleet Street. Those young urbanite commuters were reading Metro, a radical free newspaper that launched in Sweden in 1995. DMGT saw a gap in the market.
Metro UK, the newspaper that Rothermere and MacLennan launched to widespread derision, will celebrate its 10th birthday tomorrow week. It is astonishing to recall now, a decade after its fin de siècle debut, just how lukewarm the reception was that greeted Metro on Tuesday 16 March 1999, when 85,000 copies hit the streets of London in special distribution bins installed in the London Underground.
Journalists pooh-poohed the brevity of the stories, media buyers thought it too cheap, rival executives thought it was a licence to lose money. Nobody seemed to like it, except the readers, a fact Metro quickly alerted media buyers to by taking them to Waterloo station at 8am so they could see exactly the type of high-earning, full-time employed, young, ambitious, urbanite reader who was picking it up.
Today that audience includes Alison Chan, a 32-year-old lawyer from west London, who used to buy the Times but has switched to Metro. "It's easily available and I don't have to stop at the shop to buy it. It is just short enough to read on my commute. When I arrive at work I feel that I know what's going on in the world." Metro distributes 1.3m copies each weekday in 16 urban centres including Leeds, Cardiff, Manchester and Newcastle. It boasts a readership of 3.3 million people and has doubled in size from 40 to 80 pages. ABC1 readers account for 64% of its readership; 18 to 44-year-olds make up 67%. It publishes bite-sized chunks of national and international news and local what's-on listings. It does not nail its political colours to the mast and eschews opinion, the staple of paid-for titles.
Metro seems such a part of the routine now that it is easy to forget that, in its early years, its regional expansion led to fights between DMGT and regional publishers, who had their own titles to protect, including Trinity Mirror, Guardian Media Group, which publishes the Observer, and Johnston Press. After legal fights, DMGT formed partnerships to stop the ruinous spoiler papers.
When media historians cast their eye over the past decade, they will map two trends that are as contradictory as they are inexorable. The first is free, the defining trend over the past decade in print, let alone online. When Metro launched, Google was a few months old and Twittering "was what birds did", but the brand has thrived, particularly among the target market most interested in digital media.
The polar opposite to the free trend were pay-TV subscription services, of note because now major newspaper groups are copying the strategy to lock in readers to discount subscriptions deals.
But not Metro, which reportedly achieved annual profits of £8m a year during the good times. It gave itself over to advertisers in a way that no self-respecting paid-for newspaper would, sometimes coming with a glossy wraparound advert, with a free chocolate bar, or with pages two and three given over to a car ad.
But, ultimately, its success came at a cost for DMGT. Three years ago, Rupert Murdoch's NI got in on the act. The free newspaper phenomenon was one that Murdoch, chief executive of News Corporation, most definitely missed. But even he was forced to admit the damage that Metro had done to the circulation of his cash cow, the Sun. So NI, News Corporation's UK newspaper division, hatched its plan to create a targeted London afternoon freesheet, wounding DMGT's 50p London Evening Standard in the process. And just as DMGT had launched Metro all those years ago as a spoiler to shut out Swedish Modern Times Group, which had planned its own version, DMGT launched London Lite as a spoiler days before NI's thelondonpaper hit the streets in September 2006.
If NI decides to bid for the London Underground distribution contract that is crucial to Metro's success, the fight will intensify. The tender is due to be released next month. No one has any idea about the length or scope of the contract, nor if it will cover both morning and afternoon. "If everyone throws everything at it then it could have a huge impact, positive and negative, but it is far too early to say that yet," says Vanessa Clifford, head of press at media-buying group Mindshare. Ian Clark, managing director of thelondonpaper, refuses to comment on whether NI will go for the London Underground contract and switch thelondonpaper to mornings to lock Metro out. He congratulates Metro for establishing the market for free newspapers in the UK, but says: "It took it seven years to reach a circulation target that took us seven months."
The pressure has increased between the two companies. Last year, an attempt was made at a truce between Rothermere and James Murdoch, News Corporation chief executive Europe and Asia, who runs NI. It is reported that Rothermere approached Murdoch to sound him out about a peace deal, to no avail. Last month things turned nastier when the Evening Standard announced its sale to Russian billionaire Alexander Lebedev, publishing an article which took a swipe at thelondonpaper, estimating its losses at about £40m. That article prompted a senior NI executive, reputed to be James Murdoch, to lobby Rothermere personally to have the article removed from the Evening Standard website. It was.
Metro has locked up regional distribution contracts well into 2013, to fortify itself against the suspected NI onslaught, but there is no doubt that the London Underground remains crucial. If Metro loses it, Auckland vows that the paper will be handed out outside stations, just as DMGT's London Lite and thelondonpaper are currently.
Auckland says: "It is desirable to have, but it is not essential. We will not endanger the business by overbidding."