Metro (Associated Metro Limited)

Metro is the trading name of a free newspaper published by Associated Newspapers. It is available from Monday to Friday each week on most London Underground stations, many suburban railway routes and buses around the United Kingdom.

Related Topics:
Free newspaper - Associated Newspapers - London Underground

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The paper launched in London, England, in 1999, and can now be found in 12 urban centres. Localised editions are distributed in Birmingham, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Leeds, Manchester, Newcastle, Sheffield, The East Midlands and, from 2004, Bristol and Bath. It is part of the same media group as the Daily Mail, The Mail on Sunday and Evening Standard, although in some areas, the paper operates as a franchise with a local newspaper publisher, rather than as a wholly-owned concern.

Related Topics:
London - England - 1999 - Birmingham - Edinburgh - Glasgow - Leeds - Manchester - Newcastle - Sheffield - The East Midlands - 2004 - Bristol - Bath - Daily Mail - The Mail on Sunday - Evening Standard - Franchise

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In its first five years, it rocketed to over 1 million daily readers, making it the UK's fourth largest daily newspaper. It now prints approximately 1m copies daily and has officially some 1.7m readers, as of September 2005. Due to its urban and mainly youthful audience, advertising receipts have been very healthy at a time when its older stablemate, the Evening Standard, has not been performing so well. Sixty-two per cent of readers are ABC1 (upper/middle class social grade), seventy-eight per cent are aged 15–44 and sixty-four per cent are in work.

Related Topics:
September 2005 - Social grade

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The Metro concept comes from Sweden. Metro International, a different company, originally planned to launch in the UK but Associated Newspapers effectively beat them to it. Nevertheless, they have had plans to launch a rivalling free evening newspaper in London http://media.guardian.co.uk/presspublishing/story/0,7495,929049,00.html. Similarly, Rupert Murdoch is said to have regretted missing the opportunity of launching his own London paper.

Related Topics:
Metro International - London - Rupert Murdoch

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The newspaper was designed to be read in 20 minutes. One of the major ways in which it is different from most other UK newspapers is that it claims to take a determinedly independent line on political reporting. (Some commentators, such as Piers Morgan, have taken the view that traditional newspapers can only be sold on comment, not raw news.)

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The features section contains a mix of articles on travel, homes, style, health and so on, as well as extensive arts coverage and entertainment listings. The popular puzzles page contains the cartoon strips Nemi (by Lise Myhre), and This Life (by Brook), astrology readings by David Wells, and David J. Bodycombe's Think Tank brainteasers.

Related Topics:
Cartoon strips - Nemi - Lise Myhre - Astrology - David J. Bodycombe

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However it is derided in many quarters as "junk" journalism and with being a re-churning of many quirky articles found on the BBC website and others. Because of this low-brow approach to journalism it has gained the joke name of "Brain rot", mainly as re-arranging the letters of its name can be used to form "rot me".

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