Chicago bans home delivery of free papers

Free newspapers in Chicago have discovered that a new law intended to stop the indiscriminate door-to-door distribution of menus, brochures and other advertising flyers also bans many circulation practices for free newspapers. The website Inside and freepress.net report that Chicago's Aldermen, by a 50-0 vote, made it unlawful to distribute free “newspapers, periodicals and directories of any kind on any public way or other public place or on the premise of private property in the city in such a manner that it is reasonably foreseeable that such distribution will cause litter.”

That pretty much ends the distribution of free newspapers if a politician considers them to be "litter." Of course the law isn't being enforced evenly, so publications that the politicians like can continue to distribute.

The gimmick here is that the public was told that the law was designed to control litter. Who is against banning litter? Reminds us of news rack laws that are proposed to stop the proliferation of unsightly racks. Politicians will say anything to get the public to support their efforts to squelch a free press. The only question is whether publishers like those at the Tribune, Sun-Times or RedEye editorialize against this anti-free press effort or sit on their hands? Of course if they benefit from the silencing of smaller, independent competitors, they won't say a thing.

(At right is Wrigley Field, home to the Chicago Cubs. It's rumored that Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban wants to buy the team from the Tribune Co., owner of the Chicago Tribune and RedEye free daily.)

'Israeli' newspaper back from vacation

When you're a newspaper in trouble, isn't in interesting how the vultures (i.e. reporters from other papers) begin to circle. The management and staff at the "Israeli" probably know that feeling. But they're back in business after a two-week holiday. Owner Shlomo Ben-Tzvi is printing again. Globes online says the Israeli's circulation has been reduced from 40,000 a day to "reportedly less than 20,000 a day."

The Israeli is facing competition these days from Israel Today, or Israel Hayom, owned by American casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson, who has close ties to former prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu. Adelson was a partner in the Israeli, but was pushed out in a court dispute. Now he's distributing more than 150,000 papers a day — far more than the 20,000 or less circulated by the Israeli.

How not to distribute a free daily newspaper

COMMENTARY: We're frustrated to read that a group of environmentalists is petitioning British Prime Minister Gordon Brown to have him ban hawkers who give away London's free daily newspapers. Don't get upset at the environmental group Project Freesheet, headed by Justin Canning. Canning is simply taking advantage of an opportunity handed to him by the thoughtless distributors of London Lite and thelondonpaper. Both papers have been liberally handing out papers to subway riders (or passengers of the "tube" as they say in England), many of whom drop the paper seconds later, creating a very visible mess. Canning has documented the mess on videos posted online.

This policy of flooding a market with free papers in the hopes that they will be read by somebody reminds us of the techniques employed by the Examiner newspapers in the United States. The Examiners dump their papers on people's doorsteps, regardless of whether the resident wishes to have them or not. Stopping the Examiner has proven to be next to impossible, as residents in Baltimore, Washington and San Francisco have discovered. Many are suing the Phil Anschutz-owned newspaper and lobbying for legislation to ban such distribution.

These sloppy tactics cause several problems:

1. They cause observers to think free dailies have little or no value. That makes it harder to sell advertising. It's better to have readers thinking the paper is in demand so that they hold on to their copy of it, and look forward to getting one the next day.

2. They lead to legislation restricting distribution. Such laws hurt newspapers that attempt to distribute their papers in a responsible fashion.

3. They give the public the impression that publishers don't care about the environment. Now we could argue that newsprint is a renewable resource (trees are a crop just like barley, corn or soy beans), but it still looks like waste to a public that is growing increasingly sensitive to environmental issues thanks to the global warming controversy.

What's needed here is self-policing. If newspapers, whether in London or Baltimore, aren't careful about how they distribute (and how that distribution looks to the public) they may find that they can't distribute in many places in the future.

Bluffton Today growing at 20% clip

For a corporation like Morris Publishing, with revenues of $92 million in the second quarter, a unit that generates $1.17 million in sales might not seem significant.

But Morris, a chain of 27-daily newspapers mostly in the South, decided to make a special mention in its latest quarterly report (page 15) about its one free daily, the 16,500-circulation Bluffton Today, whose revenue increased $200,000, or 20.5 percent, in the quarter compared to the same period in 2006. Bluffton is a rapidly growing town next to Hilton Head and about 20 miles from Savannah.

While no more figures were offered for the Bluffton paper, we surmise that the paper's sales for the quarter went from $975,000 in 2006 to $1,175,000 this year. That would put the paper's revenues at around $4.7 million a year, give or take.

The report noted that the paper had "significant gains in the retail specialty publications produced and distributed by Bluffton, but not a part of the main newspaper."

So we're not sure how much of that gain was due to Bluffton Today. Still, at a time when newspaper ad revenues are falling (Morris reported a 7.1 percent drop companywide for the quarter), it affirms that free dailies are on the right track.

Bluffton Today is well designed and edited. It does a thorough job covering local news. We're also impressed by its method of displaying the pages for online readers. It's almost like holding a newspaper in one's hands.

The quarterly report gives us no idea what it costs to produce the Bluffton paper, but if the paper was profitable, it's certain that would have been mentioned. But that's not a put down — it may well be on the way to profitability if revenues are increasing at a 20 percent clip.

We have to wonder whether Morris will roll this prototype out to other markets.

L.A. may not have a pot of gold

COMMENTARY: A few months ago, when one of billionaire oilman Phil Anschutz's guys told me they weren't going to launch an Examiner free daily in Los Angeles, I asked why? It's the nation's No. 2 media market, an internationally known city with a five-county population of 17 million. He asked me, "Why do you think they don't have an NFL franchise?" Because the Rams moved to St. Louis and the Raiders back to Oakland? No, because LA is a dysfunctional mess. It's too big of a media market to cost-effectively advertise anything, including an NFL team, and the best you can do is divide the place up in to smaller portions. But that doesn't work because people live in one place and work in another. Plus you have a situation similiar to Miami, where a growing number of people speak Spanish and are not legal residents, limiting their purchasing ability. For many advertisers, LA doesn't make sense anymore. At least in English. La Prensa and La Opinion seem to be doing quite well.

And that brings us to the Tribune Company's plans to launch in LA a free daily oriented to the English-speaking 18-34 age group, similar to the company's RedEye in Chicago. While LA Times publisher David Hiller hinted at such an idea last week, it won't happen until Sam Zell has taken control of parent company Tribune, which could be six months or longer.

But they'll still be first. Anschutz has costed out the market and found it to be too expensive. Who knows, maybe Metro International or Dagsbrun (backer of the new BostonNOW) might want to enter LA, but how could they match the delivery and advertising infrastructure of the LA Times?

If the LA Times starts a RedEye clone in LA, it won't happen until Zell has full control. Maybe spring 2008.

LA Times may start RedEye clone

LA Times Publisher David Hiller (right) told a luncheon audience Thursday that his company may start a free daily. It would be similar to parent company Tribune's RedEye in Chicago, a profitable six-day tab that focuses on the 18-to-34 age group. Reuters quotes Hiller as saying Redeye has added 600,000 readers in an average day to the Tribune's audience. Tribune also publishes the free daily amNewYork.

In June, there was a report that billionaire oilman Phil Anschutz, the owner of the Examiner free dailies, was going to expand into Los Angeles. But a source in the Anschutz empire shot down that report in July, saying the Denver tycoon has put all newspaper expansion plans on hold until their financial picture improves. The source hinted that Anschutz was ready to pull the plug if he didn't see changes.

It's not unusual for major newspapers to announce plans to start their own free dailies in order to keep invaders out of their markets. The Denver Post did just that in January 2006 in order to keep Anschutz from starting a free daily in Denver. However, the Post has never actually launched such a paper.

Online publication insults free dailies

EDITORIAL
Paid-circulation newspapers have long found it useful to characterize free dailies as "down market," containing nothing but wire stories. It was a slap in the face intended to keep advertisers from trying free dailies. MediaLife Magazine, which rarely gets anything right when it comes to free dailies, has published a condescending piece saying they are suddenly trying to become quality publications -- as if they didn't care what they printed in the past.

Several things caught our attention in this ridiculous article:

• MediaLife points to the Examiner chain's hiring of "name columnists" as proof that free dailies are improving their news coverage. OK, who are those columnists? Conservatives Bill Sammon (a Fox News regular) and Rowan Scarborough, both of whom constantly write "news stories" defending the Bush administration. They're entitled to their opinions, but they belong on the editorial page like other pundits. If hiring these Republicans is a winning "strategerie" for the Examiner, how come the chain isn't selling more ads?

• MediaLife credits Metro with convincing U.S. advertisers to buy ads in free dailies. What about the free dailies that existed before Metro entered the U.S. market in 2001? Before Metro arrived, the U.S. had more than a dozen thriving free dailies (Denver, Boulder, Vail, Aspen, Glenwood Springs, Steamboat Springs, Telluride, Colorado; Burlingame, San Mateo, Santa Monica and Palo Alto, California; Conway, Laconia, Berlin, N.H.). Where did those papers get their ads in all of the years before Metro blazed the trail for them? Metro just copied what these successful papers had been doing for many years, claimed they invented it, and the idiots at MediaLife don't know any better. (See June 20, 2006 article where MediaLife actually claimed that Metro brought the free daily to the U.S.)

• Then there's this appalling paragraph: "Then comes the issue of how to get that free upscale paper in people's hands. With downmarket papers, that's easy. Stick it in commuters' hands as they're boarding a train or bus." Maybe Metro or the Examiner need to "stick" their papers in people's hands, but most free dailies haven't had to force their product on anyone. To the contrary, papers like the Palo Alto Daily News have readers who walk for blocks just to get their paper.

The experts quoted in the MediaLife article complain that it is hard to get a free paper in front of an upscale reader. Actually the experience of many free daily publishers is that readers of all income levels will pick up a paper — if it has news.

That makes us believe that free dailies have a bright future. But that future has little to do with what Metro or the Examiner are doing today. Both are money-losing chains where high-level managers have little idea about what readers want. In the three cities where the Examiner operates, it throws papers on driveways -- and residents are furious. And Metro Boston is purchasing recycling bins for the local transit authority to help it deal with the trash problems created by discarded papers.

If you want examples of "best practices" or "successful formulas," look at those free dailies that have been making money for years. Mostly they are driven by hard hitting local news coverage. Or visit tbt* in Florida or RedEye in Chicago, which have advanced the youth-oriented free daily.

Finally, it is easy for elitists to criticize free dailies for supposedly lacking quality. But the public decides which paper succeeds. We'd rather trust the public when it comes to selecting which newspaper prevails than an elitist anyday.

END OF EDITORIAL

Paper delivers free to homes, 50 cents in racks

An update to yesterday's item about The Messenger, the new daily in Mount Airy, N.C. Publisher Mike Milligan confirms that The Messenger is being delivered free to homes, but costs 50 cents in news racks. That's a new twist on the free-daily strategy. We know of only five other free dailies that are delivering to homes (the Examiners in D.C., Baltimore and Washington, and The Greensburg Tribune-Review in suburban Pittsbugh, Pennsylvania, and Today's Local News in northern San Diego County), but they're all free in racks and stores.

Metro New York rejects anti-Bush ads

Metro New York has rejected two ads from the political group World Can't Wait, saying they are "too inflammatory" to publish on the back page, according to the group's website. Free-daily.com is attempting to contact Metro to get its side of the story.

WCW, founded in 2005 by Revolutionary Communist Party founder Charles Clark Kissinger (according to discoverthenetworks.org), claims Metro refused to run an ad headlined “Who is the Real Nuclear Threat?” (pictured) in its September 21 issue because it was “too inflammatory” for the back page. A second ad headlined “One Million Dead in Iraq” was first rejected for placement on the September 25 back page explicitly because of its content, according to WCW.

Then, according to WCW, Metro offered placement on the back page at a price almost four times higher than what was originally agreed upon.

The WCW statement did not give dollar figures.

The dispute comes a week after The New York Times said it erred in giving another anti-war group, MoveOn.org, a $77,508 price break on a full-page ad attacking Gen. David Petraeus, the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq. The House and Senate have passed resolutoins condemning MoveOn.org for the ad, which referred to Petraeus as "General Betray Us."

WCW director Debra Sweet wrote that the decision by Metro "is undoubtedly related to the 'watch what you say' atmosphere created by the White House," which condemned the MoveOn ad.

New N.C. free daily really costs 50 cents

One of our readers in North Carolina has tipped us off to the fact that the Mount Airy (N.C.) Messenger has a cover price of 50 cents, according to the PDFs of each day's paper found at its website. We reported Aug. 13 that the paper was free based on this account in the Winston Salem Journal, which said, "The first edition of The Messenger arrived July 9 in Mount Airy, which has a population of about 8,000. It publishes Monday through Friday. Home delivery is free." We've got e-mails out to Messenger managers. Stay tuned.

A quarter of free dailies serve small towns

To many in the media, free dailies are a big city phenomena. But Henry E. Scott, former U.S. group publisher of Metro International and now interim director of the new North American Free Daily Newspaper Association, has done a survey showing a quarter of free dailies are in small towns.

Editor & Publisher has a report on the survey. Scott said that he sent out the survey to 60 free dailies and received 19 responses. While not comprehensive, it gives a small snapshot of the landscape.

Bullet points from the survey include:

• 16 free dailies have a distribution of 100,001 or more copies; 11 have circulations ranging from 50,001 to 100,000; 19 have circulations ranging from 10,001 to 50,000; and 14 have circulations of up to 10,000.

• Nearly one-third of free dailies are aimed at 18- to- 34-year old adults

• The average free daily employs 29 people

• 61% of free dailies distribute 95% or more of their copies

• 61% of free dailies do their own distribution while 39% outsource delivery

• More than half of all free dailies own their own presses

• National advertising accounts for 13% of advertising revenue. The Newspaper National Network represents about 11%

Perhaps the most surprising thing in the E&P article is that a free daily association has already been formed. There has been talk of creating such an association for months. It will be interesting to see where Scott takes it from here.

Fire guts offices of new free daily

This picture shows what's left of the new free daily SmartNews in Fayetteville, N.C. The photo is by Jim McBee, the managing editor of the young paper. He says the fire didn't burn laptops that will allow the paper to continue publishing. The 8,000-circulation paper plans to have an edition out on the streets today. SmartNews started in June with a four-day-a-week printing schedule.

'Free newspapers ... the future of print'

"Surveying the global newspaper market, it is increasingly plausible to imagine free newspapers as the future of print," writes Tim Luckhurst, a journalism professor at the UK's University of Kent, in an opinion piece in The Independent (of London). He goes on to discuss the growth of free dailies in Spain, Israel and London. Some points worth noting here:

• Associated Newspapers' London Lite and Rupert Murdoch's thelondonpaper are locked in a battle that neither can win, says former Daily Express editor Richard Addis, who nonetheless plans to join the fray with an upmarket daily provisionally named The Day. "It is a bloody, long-term battle. Each product does its job well. On its own, either would be a good business. But they can't survive together."

• London Lite had an average daily readership of 745,000 in the January-June period this year, while thelondonpaper had 713,000, Luckhurst notes, citing National Readership Survey figures. "Not bad for two titles that only appeared last year," he says.

• "When you take a European-wide view, you can really see the value of free media," says Mark Soutar, former editor of the men's magazine FHM who is launching a free men's lifestyle weekly called ShortList. "There is a big age factor: readers over 40 associate free with cheapness and poor quality; readers under 35 have been conditioned by the internet to understand you can get high quality without paying for it."

San Diego County free daily gets new editor

Today's Local News, the 75,000-circulation free daily serving northern San Diego County, has appointed a new editor. Susan DeMaggio was previously features editor of the Muskegon Chronicle in Michigan. Today's Local News is an offshoot of the Copley-owned San Diego Union-Tribune and DeMaggio will report to U-T senior news editor Todd Merriman. DeMaggio replaces Cindy Allen, who left the free paper. Today's Local News is distributed to homes in the cities of Carlsbad, Escondido, Oceanside, San Marcos and Vista. The San Marcos-based paper is published five days a week, Wednesday through Sunday.

Sun Media buys out '24 Hours' partner

Sun Media Corp. has bought out its local partner in Vancouver's "24 Hours" free daily, The Jim Pattison Group, for an undisclosed amount. "It's not a strategic investment or core holding for the Pattison group," former 24 Hours president and senior Pattison executive Glen Clark told the Vancouver Sun. "On the other hand, Sun Media is developing the brand all across the country. It's a core business for them, there are synergies for them. It made more sense for them to own 100 percent."

The first edition of 24 Hours was published in Vancouver on March 30, 2005. At the time, Sun Media was already publishing versions of 24 Hours in Montreal and Toronto. Sun Media has since launched in Calgary, Edmonton and Ottawa in French and English. The current weekday circulation of 24 Hours Vancouver is 210,400 readers, the Vancouver Sun story said.

When 24 Hours started publication, it faced fierce competition from two rival publications. One was Metro, majority-owned by Swedish publisher Metro International SA and minority-owned by CanWest Global Communications Corp. (now CanWest MediaWorks Publications Inc.). The other was Dose, owned by CanWest. CanWest has since sold its interest in Metro, and Dose is now publishing an online edition only.

London's Sun feels heat from free papers

The Sun, a London tabloid owned by Rupert Murdoch, has slashed its cover price and hired more than 100 street hawkers in order to keep circulation from decreasing in the face of a growing number of free dailies, including one owned by Murdoch, TheLondonPaper. Murdoch acknowledged in 2005 that The Sun’s circulation, now at about 3 million, had suffered at the hands of London's Metro, one of the first free dailies in the city, and since then the commuter paper has continued to increase its distribution. “Murdoch is looking around at the intensified competition, and as the market leader he is taking action first to defend his leadership,” Derek Terrington, an analyst for Blue Oak Capital, a brokerage in London, tells MediaLife.

Santa Barbara free daily adds Saturday

The 17-month-old Santa Barbara Daily Sound will expand from five to six days a week by adding a Saturday edition tomorrow (September 8). The free daily started on March 23, 2006 with a five-day publishing schedule and initial press run of 3,000. Today, the Daily Sound prints 8,000 copies a day and averages 20 pages per copy. "We have a lot of exciting plans for the year to come. The launch of our Saturday paper is the first of some great things to come for the paper," said Editor and Publisher Jeramy Gordon. Above is a scene from the Daily Sound's office captured by a San Francisco Chronicle freelance photographer, Elisa Miller, last October.

'Israeli' newspaper to take a vacation

A free daily in Israel, which had survived despite a partnership dispute, is now going on hiatus for two weeks (Sept. 23-Oct. 7)during the Jewish holiday of Sukkot and forcing the paper's 25-30 employees to take a forced vacation. The "Israeli" has been published continuously five days a week for the past 22 months but owner Shlomo Ben-Tzvi denied that the time-out means the paper will close. Still, the Israeli business publication Globes says the paper's suppliers haven't been paid. The Isreali denies it. The dispute between partners Ben-Tzvi and Las Vegas billionaire Sheldon Adelson resulted in Adelson starting his own free daily, "Israel Today," on July 31.

German Post Office may launch a free daily

The one major European nation that doesn't have many free dailies is Germany (see Piet Bakker's chart0, but that could soon change. The German post office, Deutsche Post, is considering launching a free daily, and using its letter carriers as distributors, the Frankfurt newspaper Allgemeine Zeitung reports.

Hong Kong to get first English free daily

Hong Kong, which already has three thriving free dailies, will soon have a fourth — but this one will be in English. The Associated Press reports that the paid business paper The Standard will relaunch in a week with a new design as a free daily to boost circulation. Sing Tao News Corp. said it will start next Monday (September 10) with an initial print run of 120,000, a number apparently designed at edging out its better known rival South China Morning Post, whose average daily circulation ranged from 70,000 to more than 133,000 in 2006, according to audit figures. The AP couldn't get current circulation figures for The Standard. Sing Tao said the new edition of the Standard will target expatriates and be handed out in major business districts.

E&P discovers free dailies

Before Journalism Jobs, the place to go if an up-and-coming reporter was seeking a better job was a magazine called Editor & Publisher. I can remember vividly the sight of reporters in a newsroom where I worked grabbing the latest E&P to see the "help wanted" ads. The magazine had articles too, but I never saw anybody reading them.

Today, E&P has morphed into a website about the news business. It does original reporting including this story headlined: "SPECIAL REPORT: Who Said Print Is Dead?" The article (well worth the time of anybody in the free daily business) is about the commuter or big city version of the free daily. E&P says these papers are aimed at the "club-hopping, trail-hiking, speed-dating young audience that has sustained alternative papers for more than a generation."

The article points out that there may soon be a battle for advertisers between alt-weeklies and commuter free dailies, such as Chicago's RedEye, Dallas's Quick, St. Peterburg's *tbt and Orange County's OC Post. (Not to get technical, but the OC Post is paid, while the other three are free.)

The alt-weekly formula is pretty simple: Left-wing news stories, concert listings, entertainment reviews and porno ads. The porno ads in the past kept a lot of advertisers from signing up with an alt-weekly. But commuter free dailies don't have those ads and can draw upon a broader array of advertising verticals.

Free dailies have another advantage over alt-weeklies. They come out every day. A point made by Henry E. Scott, managing director of Gansevoort Media in New York and the former group publisher of Metro U.S. at the end of the article.

The alt-weekly trade association, the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies, knows the free dailies are coming. "We used to be the gnats biting at the ankles of the big papers," says Richard Karpel of the association. "Now we have thousand of gnats around trying to take our piece of cheese."

San Francisco inundated with free dailies

Above are a number of newspapers I picked up while visiting San Francisco. They're all free. Which is great for readers but bad for publishers. San Francisco has got to be the nation's most saturated market when it comes to free newspapers, both daily and weekly.

Among the dailies, I count 9 titles: San Francisco Examiner, San Francisco City Star, San Francisco Daily, Palo Alto Daily News, San Mateo Daily Journal, San Mateo Daily News, Burlingame Daily News, East Bay Daily News and Redwood City Daily News.

And if that weren't enough, the region boasts several very readable alt-weeklies: SF Weekly, Bay Guardian, East Bay Express, Metro (San Jose) and The Bohemian. Plus a number of community weeklies too numerous to name even on a Web site.

MONEY IN TOILETS: There is more print media in the Bay Area than one can imagine. Perhaps it's due to the perceived weakness of the perennial paid dailies of the region, the Hearst-owned San Francisco Chronicle, MediaNews Group's San Jose Mercury News and Contra Costa (County) Times, and the New York Times' Santa Rosa Press Democrat. Each of those paid dailies have their strengths, but they're also boring: How do they match headlines in the free press such as "The City may throw millions into toilets" (SF Examiner, Aug. 23). And on that same day, when the Chronicle was writing about high school seniors passing exit exams, the SF Daily's headline was "Seniors having plenty of sex, survey shows," referring to those who graduated from high school many decades ago.

While all of these free papers are fun to read, obviously some aren't making money. Denver oil billionaire Phil Anschutz owns both the San Francisco Examiner and the City Star. It was the first place I headed when I arrived in town. It's right across from the bus station. The guard didn't let me past his podium, however.

EXAMINER CAN'T SURVIVE: But on the phone, an account executive told me the Examiner's circulation was 160,000 a day. I asked her how many pages, and she claimed the average page count was 60, though the three days I was there, it never got above 48. Still, assume it's 60. It would cost at least $9,000 a day to print that big of a paper (assuming newsprint at $610/ton), which comes to $2.9 million a year.

Assume the Examiner's payroll approaches $3 million a year (30 people at $100K including benefits), and the Examiner is at least a $5.9 million operation. With rent and other expenses, maybe $7 million.

So I take a rate card and go through a week of issues. Most of the pages are entirely editorial with no ads, or just house ads. On the 20 or so ads in every issue, assuming that the Examiner got top dollar on every ad, and assuming that every movie ad was paid (Anschutz is the nation's biggest movie theater owner), the Examiner generates perhaps $1.7 million a year in billings (and that's being generous).

I know Anschutz is rich, but how long will he put up with those kinds of losses?

Sadly, when you walk through residential areas, you see doorsteps with Examiners in plastic bags piled up -- unread. Piles of them. That's bad advertising for free papers. It says the paper is unwanted. It makes me think of the lawsuits the Examiner is facing in Washington and Baltimore from angry residents who don't want the free paper.

READER DEMAND: Unwanted is not the term you'd apply to the SF Daily, whose blue newsracks were empty by noon each day and their paper is stuffed with ads. It's no exaggeration to say that 70 percent of their column inches are advertising, and they have many more advertisers than the Examiner, which has been in San Francisco since the Civil War. Clearly the SF Daily is making money.

Publishers Dave Price and Jim Pavelich seem to have the touch when it comes to attracting readers and advertiser. You see people reading it in restaurants, shops and even people stopping by racks to grab a copy — perhaps because they don't have an internet edition.

But getting in touch with them proved to be impossible during my three-day visit. Here's what Amsterdam professor Piet Bakker found when he visited the SF Daily. And here's a local TV story about them.

The SF Daily had its share of hard news stories, but also things that made me laugh out loud like "Bullwinkle blamed for climate change" -- a story about how a moose belch would equal the greenhouse-gas output of a car going 20,800 miles. Or a horoscope that tells Aries readers: "If you drink, don't park. Accidents cause people." (Get it? It took me a minute!)

In the mid-1990s, Price and Pavelich started the Palo Alto Daily News, a paper about 30 miles south of San Francisco in a suburb best known for being the home of Stanford University. In the 10 years that they owned that paper, they started separate editions in San Mateo, Redwood City, Burlingame and Berkeley. They're now owned by MediaNews Group, which also owns a number of other Bay Area papers.

The battle of the free dailies in the Bay Area is just that -- a battle. We didn't even bring up the free weeklies, which were more interesting than alt-weeklies we've seen in other cities. It will be interesting to see who wins this battle of attrition.

Metro not amused by humor columnist

New York Magazine reports that Metro International has fired humor columnist Elliott Kalan, who is also a segment producer at "The Daily Show," for writing a column headlined “Newspapers: Information’s Horse & Buggy." Kalan wrote:

“Nobody reads newspapers anymore … As this very copy of Metro shows, the only way to get most people to read a newspaper is to literally force it into their hands.”

The magazine quotes an unnamed Metro staffer as saying Kalan’s column was read by Chris Spalding, the interim CEO of Metro International (which was founded in Stockholm), who was in New York on business.

“Our New York publisher, Daniel Magnus, said that the CEO told him we had to fire Elliott immediately,” says the staffer.

Kalan told the magazine that he doesn't really know why he was canned. "My assumption is that the wrong person saw it and didn’t get the joke. They’re very straightforward people, the Swedes,” said Kalan. Metro didn’t return the magazine's calls for comment.

Web site aims to stop Examiner delivery

Fed up residents in the Baltimore area have created a Web site, stopexaminer.spaces.live.com, in an attempt to stop the Examiner from being delivered to their homes. We can't tell who is behind the Web site but we were tipped off by a frustrated suburban Baltimore resident who saw an article we posted on the free paper's delivery problems and asked us for more information. Homeowners who are getting the Examiner thrown on their driveways against their wishes are also organizing a boycott of Examiner advertisers.

Here are some of the stories we have run previously on the Examiner's circulation complaints:

• Ex-Examiner circulation employee speaks out

• Judge asked to stop Examiner distribution

• Examiner goes on damage control mode

COMMENTARY: Our position on this is that while we wish the Examiner and other free dailies success, this festering problem will not only damage the Examiner but the entire industry. The Examiner needs to re-examine (pun intended) its business model and determine whether the hostility it is creating is worth it. We would hate to see the communities surrounding Baltimore enact laws prohibiting this type of distribution. Such laws could spread across the country, affecting other free papers, including those that respect the rights of homeowners.