En tidning i tiden? Metro och den svenska dagstidningsmarknaden

Sammanfattning: From the time the free daily newspaper Metro was introduced in Stockholm in 1995 until the autumn of 2002, Metro International has expanded its free paper operations to 25 locations worldwide. Other companies have since then launched similar newspapers – over 80, in fact. Of these, about 50 titles remained on the international newspaper market in the late 2002. The question then, is whether the launch of Metro in Stockholm can be seen as the start of something new in the newspaper world. The empirical aim of the dissertation is to describe the newspaper Metro and explain its success and significance for the newspaper market in Sweden. Metro is analyzed with the help of several perspectives, for example conditions of the two markets – readership and advertising – where a newspaper operate, but also in a political, technical and economical context. Material and methodology used are of several kinds. Document analysis, interviews, content analysis, survey research, focus group interviews and statistics from various external sources are used. The main result is that the core idea behind Metro was an internal low cost base strategy together with a relative high price strategy toward advertisers. Metro used a new type of distribution – public transportation – reduced staff size, based its content on brief news summaries, and used new technology. The readership as a whole has expanded since the launch of Metro, and the paper has been able to attract groups that the traditional morning paper previously had difficulty reaching. A decline in circulation, penetration and advertising revenue among the other papers has occurred throughout the 1990’s; however, it is likely that this tendency would have persisted with or without the introduction of Metro.