The battle of the freesheets - Will the public ultimately lose out?
Published January 19th, 2006 in PR in IrelandThe best things in life are free, but sooner or later the government will find a way to tax them - Author Unknown
There is lots of talk about the continuing battle of the freesheets in Dublin between the Metro and Herald AM. The most decisive moments will probably be when CIE (the Irish rail authority) decides which publication will be able to distribute its paper to rail passengers.
Because I regularly walk to work I can see what a difference a distribution point makes to either publication’s circulation. I normally end up with a copy of Herald AM instead of the Metro because the person giving out the Metro is normally on the opposite side of the road. Distributing copies of either freesheet to rail passengers will go one further though because they are a captive audience and will willingly take a paper to read to pass the time.
What worries me though is whether the public are ultimately going to lose out. These publications are designed as a twenty minute read and readers are literally flinging them away when they are finished. Surely the makers of the Metro and Herald AM should start making a contribution to the Dublin Litter Agency to help with their cleanup?
As the battle between both freesheets goes up a notch, more copies of either paper are going to end up on the side of the street. So instead of becoming a free resource, they could become a public nuisance. PR crisis in waiting for both publications or simply a sign of Dubliners’ disregard for rubbish bins?
Technorati Tags: Herald AM, Metro, Piaras Kelly
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To be honest, I don’t see a lot of discarded newspapers on the ground but if it became a problem I’m sure the city fathers would have something to say about it. Presumably they could introduce a by-law which explicitly prohibited the distribution of free newspapers.
I’m still amazed at the number of people they were able to get to distribute the papers (at about 48 hours notice)
The title poses an interesting question. I drive past c. 1/2 dozen distribution points daily. To me at this point there seems to be notably more Herald distributors on the street. Does this mean the Metro is losing out. I don’t think so. The Metro have said from the outside that this is a long term play and that means years. They have also I believe targetted getting to something like 55,000 in terms of copies being distributed daily. Most importantly as I have come to understand their thinking, they did not enter the market to take out the Herald but rather to put a completely new proiduct into the market that had its own space and standing. If all that is the case then it raises serious questions as to the strategy adopted by Herald management and it’s long term wisdom. It’s hard to believe that the existence of a ‘morning’ Herald isn’t cannabalising the sales of the Evening Herald so The Independent Group pocket may be getting hit twice (the cost of Herald AM and the losses on the Evening Herald) to protect themselves against something that was targetting a market they weren’t in in the first place and against a ‘competitor’ that may not have impacted them that badly if they had just stood back and let them get on with it??
It’s a theory anyway