| Product: |
Metro |
| Date: |
05/03/01 (54 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: Free. Um. Free. It isn't a bad read
Disadvantages: Metro Life
This year the Daily Mail decided to expand its free Metro service across the UK. That and new electronic publishing deals increased the company’s annual project expenditure from around £20m to £69m.
I read the Scottish Metro. That makes a difference. Up here in Scotland the Metro is a franchise; it’s a deal between the Daily Mail and a company known as Trinity Mirror. I think it has been a fairly successful venture that explains will be why the Metro is looking to extend similar deals across the UK.
The Metro does well. It’s an easy read when you’re on the bus, crawling through the road works and the traffic on your way to work. The paper gets the mix of business and popular news just right. The first couple pages are dedicated to the headline stories - the sort of thing you might hear on the radio once you get to work or may have already seen on the TV in the morning. Since the issues are printed semi-locally you can expect both general and area weather reports, which is always a huge bonus.
On average, it is a forty-page publication and the first, oh, 15 or so are given over to real news. After this time the adverts become more and more dominant. Hey, what did you expect, it is free. There is a small and I fear, generally useless “Metro Life” section that haunts the middle pages.
Okay, since I’ve said the entertainment (ah!) section is useless, I had better try and explain why. Generally the topics they cover are out of date. Today, for example, the first article is on the film Gladiator. Gee, I mean, its like I did already know enough about that movie. When you get deeper into the “Metro Life” (if you both) they seem to select arty reviews and then give an “average man” summary and opinion of them. I feel the combination is useless.
I don’t mean to put you off, though. The news articles before are better. They are not written in the awful tabl
oidese the drives me up the wall. They don’t dumb it down too far and you can tell that there isn’t some awful academic wrestling against the urge to dive into Purple Prose.
The sports news can be found by turning straight to the back of the paper and flicking back a few pages. Thankfully it isn’t just Football, Football and kick-the-ball-with-your-foot-sport. The paper does make the effort to cover the more obscure (read: struggling) sports but sometimes this can appear to be nothing more than a token effort. For example, the current issue had (I think) a small paragraph on the Paisley Pirates Ice Hockey team. Who?
The summary is easy. The darn thing is free! Pick it up. Is it worth the paper it is printed on? Well, that depends how much of the pulp is recycled.
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