Free French Daily Provokes Debate
Important Details: It’s a simple idea, with a twist. Publish a Monday through Friday daily and hand it out free to readers, avoiding the obstacle of paid circulation. Metro newspapers, with 81 dailies stretched out across the globe, has built a big business, and Clarity Media Group has blazed the same path in San Francisco, Washington, D.C. and Baltimore. But the Bollore Group, well-established in manufacturing and transport but a relative newcomer to publishing, broke the mold when it said it was targeting an elite readership. The controversy, well-described in the Wall Street Journal, is about the strategy of going free with the paper meant for well-heeled readers and the advertisers who target them. About 350,000 of matinPlus papers are handed out each workday in Paris. LeMonde owns a 30% stake, and some of its writers work for the paper.
The controversy centers on whether a free paper covering serious national, international, and political news (along with business, sports, and the arts), but doing it with a small format and catchy advertising agency-driven design, can work. One critic observed that the paper isn’t real journalism, "but more of a marketing project." To which Cedric de Bailliencourt, CEO of Bollore’s media assets, replied: "The fact that it is free doesn’t mean the quality is poorer. We believe it is good-quality journalism."
In Outsell’s Opinion: The link between paid circulation and high-quality, attractive-to-advertiser audiences has weakened dramatically. For decades, newspapers and magazines worked hard to distinguish themselves as paid publications, the "paid" denoting an audience that thought enough of the product to pay for it, and to pay attention to it. That linkage weakens more dramatically now given the free news and information wonderment of the internet, though paid daily circulation itself has been weakening for half a century. There are many ways online to prove the value of a free audience in the trackable and measurable response of customers. Now we even see Google moving beyond pay-per-click to pay-per-action. Publishers of free newspapers — metro commuter dailies as well as ex-urban weeklies — have been smart to see the change that "free" has come to mean. It doesn’t mean "cheap"; it simply means you don’t have to pay for it. And that apparently breaks down an obstacle — it’s not really the coin needed, is it? — between reader and publication.
For paid circulation publishers, it’s a time to look beyond their own tried-and-true marketing — advertisers want paid circulation readers — and understand the world’s gotten a lot messier. It doesn’t mean immediately abandoning the paid model, though we know of US dailies that have drawn up such contingency plans. It means looking for ways to get more products into the hands of customers, one way or the other, before newcomers to the staid old publishing industry beat them to it.