Born In a Small Town

By: Mark Fitzgerald Free quick-read papers are crowding into the world's most crowded cities, from New York to Hong Kong. Now, Canadian publisher David Black is out to prove that free papers can also make it in small towns that barely have stoplights, let alone mass transit systems.

Last month, Black Press Ltd. launched seven free daily newspapers in British Columbia towns such as Nanaimo, Cowichan Valley, and Parksville-Qualicum -- places you've never heard of but are markets in which the chain already publishes free non-dailies that compete with the dailies of Canada's largest chain, CanWest Global Communications Corp.

Black Press is not related to the troubled Canadian-born media baron Conrad Black; it's principally owned by David Black and operated out of Victoria, B.C. Torstar, publisher of The Toronto Star and 75 other papers, owns 20% of Black Press.

Black tested the small-town freebie concept with the February launch of two free dailies in Kelowna and Vernon, where it publishes free community papers that come out three times a week.

"Obviously, the idea was spawned with the original launch of Metro in Toronto," said Jim Tighe, president of the Black subsidiary Island Publishers. After first trying to compete with its own free commuter paper when Metro Toronto came to town, Torstar became partners in the paper with Metro International, the huge Luxembourg-based publisher of free dailies worldwide. Torstar and Metro have since launched a Metro in Vancouver.

All the papers take their name from the chain's News Bulletin weeklies and simply add the word Daily and a geographic reference, such as the Kelowna News Bulletin Daily. The idea is to create more brand awareness for the weeklies, and provide more opportunities to upsell display and classified ads, Tighe said.

The dailies are thin tabloids, running 20 pages, and the only things that changes from town to town are the ads and the nameplates. "It's the exact same paper," Tighe said. "There are 14 ad slots, ranging from full pages down to a banner. Editorially, it's about 90% Reuters [wire copy] and 10% picked up from the weeklies."

So far, Tighe said, the market reaction has been good, if not yet great. In the first weeks in Nanaimo, for instance, distributors have been dropping 10,000 copies a day and getting returns of fewer than 1,000.

Is he worried the dailies will cannibalize the community papers? "Nah," Tighe said. "As far as cannibalization, hopefully, it goes against the competition."