ABSTRACT
CONCLUSION: A QUESTION OF QUALITY The model of online publishing brings some of the forces of commercial television to all content publishers: the direct drive to attract audiences, the short attention span of readers and the need to produce captivating mater-
Informational news has established clear formats for the delivery of simpler textual content on the Web; it has also led to a tranformation of the media industries themselves. Television has become more Web-like in its delivery of content. Likewise newspapers have taken on the look of the Web in their content. This organization of content is no more graphically represented than by the free transit newspaper Metro. Metro is the next generation of highly formatted newspapers that has taken the development that USA Today began 22 years ago as a satellite delivered national newspaper in the United States to new heights of now international convergence. Although its content is language specific in 15 countries and 23 editions, its new stories are categorically Weblength articles. As its own publicity indicates, the newspaper is not long or difficult to read: ‘[It] can be read in a 16.7 minute commute’. In its relative short history launching in Stockholm in 1995, it is now the fourth largest newspaper in the world with 10.1 million readers daily. Targeting the reader that is now less attached to the usual daily newspaper, Metro has produced a publication that is comfortable for a new generation weaned on the Web’s informational news. It provides a light mix of the international, local, national and entertainment in a paper that actually is stapled together for the convenience of the commuter and to maintain its presence when discarded for others to read. Distributed exclusively at mass transit locations for free in cities with major commuter traffic, the paper has successfully targeted a younger readership than other newspapers and an unusual 50 per cent per cent female readership. Metro represents the best example of the migration of the Web’s structure of informational news outside of the online world.
