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.