A new commuter paper in Toronto looks to stand out from the crowd by focusing on the afternoon commute, not the morning one. It’s a blast from the past for a newspaper. Years ago, many cities had both a morning paper and an afternoon one — eventually, most PM editions folded, leaving the early-morning thump of a newspaper on a porch the only one.
But why? In a lot of ways, an afternoon newspaper makes sense: you can get at least some of that days’ news in; you can print it during the day rather than paying pressmen an overnight rate; and there’s a little bit more flexibility with delivery — get it to the house after people leave for work, and it sits there for eight hours, yellowing in the sun. Get it there half an hour after they get home, and they can still pick it out of the mailbox after supper.
There’s also the competitiveness aspect of it. We live in a world where news is almost instantaneous on the Internet. When people read their news online, and then go home and read yesterday’s news in the paper, the paper looks even more stodgy than before. And when the paper does scoop something, it’s pretty easy for the morning news radio and TV shows to read it out on the air — hours before anyone else sees it in the paper. An afternoon paper would make that a lot tougher.
So why might it not work? One of the people heading up a morning commuter paper, Metro, says that the company has considered it, but it doesn’t work in practice:
the global daily giant has examined the possibility of an afternoon edition but has dismissed it due to several roadblocks, including how to transport the newspapers through heavy traffic. Metro has launched afternoon editions in Stockholm and Copenhagen, only to see them fold.
“It lasted just for a few months because we simply were unable to get advertisers to move to an afternoon format,” Mr. McDonald said. “That was an absolute killer.”
Advertisers and heavy traffic, eh? Seems manageable.
Grant Hamilton
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Colin
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Noto