Metro is dead. Long live StarMetro.
Torstar, which owns the Toronto Star and the remaining Metro newspapers in English Canada, announced Monday that it will be rebranding the Metro papers to StarMetro and bringing them closer to the Star fold, moving their websites to thestar.com and sharing stories between the two. At the same time it is adding 20 journalists to three of the Metro newspapers — Vancouver, Calgary and Edmonton.
The Star’s story on the announcement, as well as nearly identical insert-city-name-here stories in each of the Metro papers (Toronto, Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Halifax), don’t give much details beyond that, but expect to see more Metro content in the Toronto Star, and more Toronto Star content in the Metro papers.
Despite the this-is-good-news nature of the announcement, there are no plans to resurrect Metro papers that have been killed recently. Metro Ottawa and Winnipeg were sold to Postmedia in November to be shut down. Metro also previously had papers in London, Regina and Saskatoon, plus digital-only editions in four other cities.
Métro Montréal, Canada’s only French-language version of the paper, is owned by Transcontinental, which has put it up for sale.
The Torstar changes take effect on April 10. At that point, the Metro app will also be shut down, and visitors to the metronews.ca websites redirected to The Star’s new pages for each city.
This relates to online only, so pure addition. Metro commuter papers rebranding, adding more local copy in western markets. Halifax continuing its local coverage. Star print remains the same size. But online becomes deeper, richer, with much more local content in some cities.
— Eirene Gentle (@IreneGentle) April 2, 2018
Paywall must be around the corner once they go national.
A paywall for a network of free newspapers would be … weird.
Spending a gazillion dollars on an iPad app is also … weird.
It’s been 3 days now and the local Metro (Vancouver) has been running only wire copy and a few of the duller Star Columnists (Emma Teitel DON’T come down).
So where are the new staff?
Vancouver had about 3 writers, including the redoubtable Jen St. Denis.
One hopes that they get the former 24 Hours enterprising reporter Michael Mui.
But why the “silence”?
The changes start next week.
I miss the horoscopes and the games :(
This new revamped Metro is horrible. Busy, cluttered…too many Ads. Most articles are non-described and/or refer you to links…
They’ve removed all the street-level Metro boxes from our area so that you can only access the paper if you take the subway (which we don’t take regularly). What is the rational behind that decision?
It’s Tuesday 17th April, and the free papers appear to be gone from Vancouver. TorStar buys out Metro and 24; dumps 24 because they don’t want to run two papers in the city; and now dumps Metro as a free paper. Website directs you to buy a subscription or get lost. The street boxes have not been filled for two days, so farewell to crossword and sudoko on the train to work. Honestly, however, I’m not sorry to see them gone (except for the games), as Metro had always been pro-NDP, rather than, as befits a news outfit, neutral, and their coverage of the pipeline issue was getting increasingly shrill. So good riddance to that, but alas for the games.
Yah, revamped Metro “newspaper” now has a higher advertisement to news ratio, and contains just a bunch of links. So much for hiring more reporters, they could just have have well trained a bunch of monkeys to search for links to stories…
I miss the old Metro & 24 hours.
This new Star ‘Metro’ version has fewer pages than before, hardly any news, consists mostly of advertising, a few blurbs here and there to temp to you to go to their website (which I can’t access on the ttc train) and they took away the Recipe. They just post a picture of the meal and a link to their website, so it’s useless. I refuse to go to the Star website. If I really want that recipe now, I just google it and find it on another site…
I used to pick up the Metro for my elderly mother who is technologically challenged, and will never touch a smartphone/computer/tablet, and she dislikes it as well.
Also, you can only pick it up if you are past the subway gates, after you’ve paid!
It’s a huge disappointment and a waste of paper. Thumbs down!
Why eliminate delivery routes to resturants like Tim Hortons? I assume it’s del.costs.
Shame these papers are going down hill fast !