ABSTRACT
Free newspapers undoubtedly represent the single most significant development in the structure of the local press since the 1960s. The spectacular and rapid growth of free newspapers, in terms of both number of published titles and aggregate distribution figures, has been described, in a style uncharacteristically bland for the Guardian, as ‘the quiet revolution in newspapers’. 1 In an equally untypical but more euphuistic prose News International, referring to the ephemeral and short-lived character of some free newspapers in conditions of a volatile market, observed that ‘freesheets come and go like feathers in the breeze’. 2 Developments in the free press, however, have not always been heralded in such measured terms. An article in AFN News with the intriguing title ‘Why do people on a diet read more free newspapers?’ reported the major findings of a British market research survey on patterns of readership which discovered that ‘76.1% of men who use hair restorer also read free newspapers, while only 54.7% read paidfors’. 3 Such apparently fatuous, if not bizarre, research emphasizes the need for free newspapers to identify for advertisers, as precisely as possible, their readership and its consumer preferences. The significance of advertisers to the free press cannot be overstated. Their influence is pervasive and central in determining the free newspaper's financial viability, the number of copies distributed, the distribution areas, the nature of the paper's readership, levels of staffing and, ultimately, the content of the newspaper. Free newspapers, above all other sectors of the local press, offer the clearest possible refutation of the suggestion that newspapers, left to the forces of the market, can be relied upon to produce a wide range of critical news and reporting of their community for their readers.
