Joe Pesaturo gets paid to know what’s going on at the MBTA. So you’d better believe that when Pesaturo, the transit authority’s chief spokesman, is waiting for his trolley, he’s watching what his fellow riders are doing. And what are they doing? According to Pesaturo, they’re picking up the Metro. “It’s almost automatic,” he says. “They stop at the corner, they grab a Metro out of the box, and they board the Green Line.”
In May, the Boston Metro marked its second birthday, and the thin tabloid with the green masthead and the staples in the spine had plenty to celebrate. In two years, the audited circulation–picked up, not paid–for the commuter newspaper had risen from a little less than 100,000 to about 165,000. After a launch that saw some of its distribution boxes forcibly removed from MBTA stations and advertisers given two-for-one deals to make up for the rough start, the Metro has become an established presence on the T. According to its parent company, Modern Times Group, the Boston edition is on pace to turn a profit well ahead of its three-year target; its ad sales are up 41 percent for the year.
The slim giveaway will never be mistaken for a source of high-impact journalism–the company’s European parent even has a “no investigations” policy to keep Metro from stepping too deeply into controversy–but it has become the daily briefing of choice for thousands of T riders. Look around any train car in the morning, and lots of commuters are reading Metro–or at least hiding tired eyes behind it.
“It’s good for keeping you occupied on the train,” says Andrew Shane, 23, a hospital Web-site editor heading to work on a May morning. “But I wouldn’t ever pay for it.”
That should be good news for the Hub’s established newspapers, which tend to dismiss the Metro as “news lite,” while they see their own products as classier, more all-encompassing–and worth paying for. While The Boston Globe and the Boston Herald did institute some localized, defensive price cuts when the Metro first came to town, the consensus among newspaper watchers was that they really didn’t sweat the new arrival.
The question is, will readers like Shane pay for anything? Newspaper readership on the whole has been declining for years, especially among young people, where it has dropped by more than half since the 1970s. Has the Metro won the hearts of those vexing young readers by giving the news away for free? And if so, what does that mean for the media mainstream?
“It’s the biggest question facing the entire newspaper community,” says Boston Phoenix media critic Dan Kennedy. “Has the cultural disengagement from public life doomed newspapers? No matter how they try to reinvent themselves…, it may be that they can’t get away from the fact that their primary mission is to inform us about public culture. If we don’t care about that public life in the way we used to, [newspapers] will never have the same role.”
News kids on the block
Boston is a newspaper town. A recent Newspaper Association of America report showed the Boston Metropolitan area had an adult readership penetration of 66 percent, fourth highest in the country. It is one of a handful of American cities supporting more than one strong daily newspaper. Given that penetration, the institutionalized competition between the Globe and Herald, a group of established suburban dailies ringing the city, and a respected free alternative weekly, Boston would seem a hard market to crack. Tougher still is imagining that a new publication–even a free one–could waltz in and win readers at a time when newspaper circulation is in decline. But the rise of the Boston Metro is there for all to see, in subway riders’ hands, tucked under their arms, or left on their seats.
“I do a 20-minute train journey every day,” says Katrina Humblers, 28, a bartender at the Burren in Somerville’s Davis Square, as she solves the Metro‘s crossword puzzle during her Red Line commute. “It fills it almost exactly. It’s not all I want, but it’s just there, so I pick it up.”
Such comments come as no surprise to Russell Pergament, the man behind the Boston Metro. “Boston has been an easy city,” says Pergament. “It’s got a European-style mass-transit system, and it carries people whose income is higher than the surrounding market. They’re well-paid, young professional working people, and they’re taking the train in.”
In May, Pergament announced that he was giving up the role of publisher–or “managing director,” in Metro parlance–to seek new adventures. It surprised no one that a man sometimes described as a “serial entrepreneur” would get antsy once the Metro got its feet on the ground.
says the Metro is actually helping to
build future newspaper consumers.
A charismatic, fast-talking publishing veteran who resembles the late actor and one-time Celtic Chuck Connors, Pergament gained renown for growing a single weekly serving Brookline and Newton into the Tab Newspaper Group. The free, upstart weeklies found a strong circulation base among suburban homeowners because of their intensely local focus. Pergament’s Tab success became the topic of a Harvard Business School case study. The papers were eventually scooped up by the venture capital arm of the mutual fund giant Fidelity Investments, which purchased the Tab group –by the early 1990s, 14 editions–as one of the major components of the Community Newspaper Co., a group of more than 100 Eastern Massachusetts publications.
“It was quite a time,” Pergament says of the Tab‘s suburban insurgency. “We were taking on three or four entrenched papers.”
Fidelity later sold CNC to Pat Purcell’s Herald Media, but by then, Pergament was long gone, having lost a power struggle over control of the direction of CNC. He later invested some of his profits in the State House News Service, a small syndicate that doles out news from Beacon Hill to newspapers and lobbyists, run by a Tab alumnus, Craig Sandler.
When the Metro organization looked to launch in Boston, it turned to Pergament to find a candidate for publisher. Like Dick Cheney heading the vice-presidential search committee, Pergament picked himself, then sprinkled Boston Metro‘s front line with seasoned Tab soldiers. His first editor was Dan Cacavarro, a Tab veteran recently of the Valley Advocate. But after about 10 months, Pergament tossed Cacavarro overboard, replacing him with John Wilpers, a former Tab editor-in-chief. The Boston Metro also started off with a column–since discontinued –from WB56 political analyst and former Tab reporter Jon Keller, and still runs a Sandler-penned weekly State House news roundup.
Pergament is also responsible for the quirks–the daily animal item on the front page (“the animal always wins”), the listing of restaurants with health code violations–that have made the Boston edition distinctive, despite the rigid Metro format.
Two years after launch, however, Pergament felt satisfied that the paper could carry on without him. “This paper’s made it,” he says. Filling in for Pergament on a temporary basis is Steve Morris, an executive with Metro‘s parent company. Morris says Boston Metro‘s next publisher will likely come from within the company.
But on the editorial side, Pergament’s legacy will endure. “We’re both cowboys,” says Wilpers. “I’m not quite as manic, but I share his editorial philosophy, and it will be protected. I wouldn’t be here if he and I didn’t agree. All the things he loved to do, I love to do.”
Riding the T
Boston Metro is one of 25 papers owned by a Modern Times Group subsidiary, Metro International. Pelle Tornberg, the Swedish company’s CEO, has said he wants his free newspapers, with their signature high story count, miniscule story length (fewer than 250 words), and uniform layout to be as identifiable a brand as McDonald’s. For content, the paper relies principally on Reuters, Bloomberg, and occasionally Christian Science Monitor wire copy, plus cultural coverage and sports scores. Metro takes no editorial stances apart from bylined columns.
The target market for Metro is young, urban commuters aged 18 to 34. Revenue for the newspaper comes from advertising geared toward those readers, such as H&M, the discount clothing store for young people that was a staple of Boston Metro‘s early issues. Metro keeps its staffing lean and non-union.
In a typical launch, Metro partners with a public transportation authority, trading free advertising to obtain exclusive distribution rights within transit stations. Paris, Barcelona, Rome, Warsaw, Stockholm, Buenos Aires, and Toronto are among the cities with Metro International-owned papers. The company gives its newspapers three years to reach profitability, or else they are shut down. That happened in Zurich last spring, with the company drawing fire as a case study in the hazards of a globalized media from an international press association because of its swift summary action against a failing franchise.
Boston was the company’s second US launch. The year before, Metro invaded the Philadelphia market via the city’s transit system, fighting off a lawsuit from Philadelphia newspapers that disputed a government agency’s right to make an exclusive distribution deal with an individual publication.
In Boston, the MBTA would not enter into any kind of agreement with Metro. The morning of its launch, in fact, MBTA officials removed some Metro boxes that had been left at stations.
In response, Pergament brought in an army of 200 hawkers to hand the papers to commuters. He eventually reduced that force to 75, placed in busy, high-visibility locations like Boston’s Downtown Crossing, and planted free Metro boxes in the landscape of newspaper coin boxes near T stations. Metro is also distributed on college campuses, in Dunkin’ Donuts stores, and other spots, for a total of about 800 locations.
What did the established Boston papers do to respond to the launch of the Boston Metro? Very little. There was no lawsuit and no defensive launch of their own competing publication. (In Chicago, both the Tribune and Sun-Times put out youth-market tabloids, in part to keep the Metro out of their backyards, according to Chicago Reader columnist Michael Miner.)
“It was our prediction that the market that it would affect the most wasn’t the one that reads our product the most,” says Globe president Rick Daniels.
Still, the Globe and Herald both cut single-copy prices at some high-traffic locations, and added hawkers to work near some of the Metro‘s people. And there is no doubt that the Boston Metro has tapped an advertising audience long coveted by the mainstream press.
“The Metro has become a compelling product,” says newspaper consultant David Cole. “When the advertiser says, ‘We want the 18- to 35-year-old slot,’ they say, ‘We deliver that.’ Newspapers right now can’t talk about delivering slices.”
“Our ads sell like a sumbitch,” says Pergament.
In fact, the paper has filled up with so many ads it has squeezed out the “cover story,” the oddly named (it never appeared on the front page) feature that was Metro’s only in-depth fare.
“When you start a new product, you’ve got a lot more space,” Morris explains. “We’re at a point where we’re willing to suffer the loss of cover stories relative to our total page count–as a result of gaining ad pages.” Still, Boston Metro plans to run one cover story a week, drawn either from the company story bank that offers in-depth features to all of its publications–the Boston staff contributes two locally generated cover stories a year–or the Christian Science Monitor news service.
The paper’s growing ad-page count has caught the attention of the Globe, in more ways than one. “They’ve got an interesting group of advertisers,” Daniels says. “We share some of them. Today, there was Filene’s on the back, with a Lancôme ad, an Acela Express ad, auto dealers, and here’s this whole thing about medical experiments…. It’s interesting, eclectic, kind of funky.”
The Globe professes not to be worried about losing advertisers to the transit tabloid. “Have we seen our budgets be reduced by any advertiser who is using the Metro? No,” says Daniels.
On the other hand, the Globe has let some of its own advertising revenues drip into the Metro‘s coffers. For more than 18 months, Boston Works, the Globe‘s recruitment, or “help wanted,” section, has placed advertisements in a highly visible Monday Metro pop-up section.
“We had a need to extend our reach in some demographics where they’re particularly strong–the commuter demographic, the younger demographic that uses public transportation all the time,” says Tim Murphy, director of marketing for Boston Works. “The Globe is dominant in this marketplace by all kinds of reach metrics, but college kids are tougher for anybody, any media, to hit. The way Metro meets that demographic, through the commuting stations–that’s a compelling idea.”
Thinking young
Reaching that youthful demographic is important for the future of newspapers, according to Lawrence Eagle-Tribune editor William Ketter, a former Globe executive who also teaches journalism at Boston University.
“I think every mainstream newspaper is trying to find ways to attract young readers,” Ketter says. “The young people starting careers and families are not getting into papers in the ways they have in the past.”
That does not mean they never will, says Phoenix media critic Kennedy, who argues that the Globe and Herald still represent a value proposition in terms of their in-depth content. “I do not think the Globe or Herald did anything wrong with respect to Metro, unless charging for the paper can now be defined as wrong,” he says. “I suppose either or both papers might have done what the Tribune and the Sun-Times did in Chicago–that is, try to claim for themselves the market for callow young people who can’t name who the vice president is–but that would have taken a lot of money, money far better spent on real news coverage.”
Nevertheless, both Boston dailies are shaking things up a bit, whether in response to the Metro or not. At the Herald, Ken Chandler, a veteran of the New York Post, which has gained circulation by tarting up its offerings and halving single-copy prices, has come on board as a consultant. Recently, the Herald has inflated its headlines and expanded its gossipy “Inside Track” column into a two-page spread. Herald Media has also recently implemented cost-cutting measures.
“I think that Metro in a market like Boston is really a threat to the Herald,” says Steven Burgard, director of the journalism program at Northeastern University. “It’s really the street paper, the straphanger paper, the paper with the lunch-pail readership of yore.” Last year, Herald publisher Pat Purcell admitted to the Boston Business Journal that some of his tabloid’s circulation drop was attributable to the Metro. In a June interview with the Phoenix‘s Kennedy, Purcell labeled the Metro “an annoyance.” (Purcell did not return repeated calls requesting an interview for this story.)
Meanwhile, the Globe pretends not to take notice of the Metro, but does so, in its own way. “Honestly, when we were doing the planning for any kind of campaign or considering changes, the subject and the word Metro didn’t occupy much of our time,” Daniels says. But, he adds, “The demographic did, the single copy demographic, the younger skew, those went through our mind a lot.”
Indeed, the Globe‘s response might not come in the paper itself, but in other products aimed at younger readers. “Seven years ago, we launched Boston.com for this very segment,” Daniels says of the Web portal the Globe started in 1995. “It has a great advertising budget; it’s profitable. We think it’s one of the great brands for younger readership in Boston.”
And there may be more in the offing. “We also have focus groups going talking about what kind of products we can and should be doing to attract a readership of that age,” says Daniels. “I’m talking about a print product now. It could be free, paid, weekly, daily–there’s a lot of options right now.” Daniels wouldn’t elaborate further.
To each his own
If you ask Pergament, the Boston Metro is actually helping to build future newspaper consumers. “We’re sort of a farm team for the bigger papers,” he says. “We’re bringing more readers into the field. I don’t think we’re taking away their readers. A real sports junkie is going to buy the Globe or Herald, for example. We’re going after the nontraditional newspaper reader. For half of our readership, we’re the only way they get their print news.”
For some, it’s apparently the only way they want to.
It’s a warm Thursday morning in May, and inside the Porter Square T station a pair of newspaper hawkers are working side by side–one from the Globe, one from the Metro.
At 9 a.m., the woman from Metro, who speaks with a strong Russian accent about the benefits of her Herbalife supplements, takes off her green Metro jersey, puts her remaining papers in one of the free daily’s two boxes just outside the station, and departs.
Adam “Wildman” Wilde, a goofy, goateed 36-year-old actor hired by the Globe as part of a promotional push, remains behind. He is one of five actors the paper has hired to support a recent television ad blitz, which featured a preachy, semi-hip hawker spouting the Globe‘s slogan (“Your world, unfolding daily”) to workers in the Financial District. For the next several weeks, Wilde will be pushing the papers all over town: Copley Square, Fenway Park, but mostly at T stations, during the morning commute.
Wilde is down to the last two papers in his stack when a young woman enters the station, stops, looks around, and turns towards him.
“Metro?” she asks. Wilde tells her the Metro woman has gone.
But wait. He reaches between his two remaining copies of the Globe. Hidden in there, folded in half, is a Metro, and he hands it to her. She takes the Metro and walks back to the escalator, heading for the train. Another satisfied customer.
Jeffrey Klineman is a freelance writer in Cambridge.