Yesterday’s issue of Metro (PDF) sang from the heavens about the latest NADbank ratings report which showed that the paper gets 244,700 daily readers, just passing the Journal, La Presse and 24 Heures for the top spot on the island of Montreal.
(The figures are for the island, not the metropolis, since Metro is only distributed in the city’s core.)
The figures seem to represent a national trend, as free dailies are seeing huge increases in readership, and that increase, along with modest gains from the Globe and Post, are helping to raise the overall average of newspaper readership in Canada.
So call this one a victory for bite-size news with no analysis, and newspapers with no few journalists spewing out wire copy by the cheap.
Not exactly true that Metro is only distributed on the island. Transcontinental has an agreement with McDonald’s to distribute them at their restaurants throughout the metropolitan area. I can’t dig out the press release for it but I know for a fact that McDonald’s as far out as Saint-Basile-le-Grand, some 25km from off-island, received it daily as late as last year. Of course, this distribution is much sparser and it wouldn’t make for as nice a number for Metro International if we consider the peripheral areas.
I guess the question local for-sale dailies need to ask now is: what are we doing wrong?
Question: if readership for everyone is increasing, isn’t it a victory for everyone?
I read free dailies (for all of two seconds) and oftentimes enjoy a futile game of Sudoku. I also read magazines and online copy from the major dailies. I don’t buy physical copies because… they’re inconvenient to read on the fly or under the desk when the boss isn’t looking. Too many inserts, too much ad crap spilling out, etc.
What if a non-journalist working on a free daily happen to publish a blog? Does the double-negation turn the person into a real journalist? Talk about a profession with an identity crisis.