Tuesday, January 23, 2007

Paper Jam

Anyone who commutes regularly to and from central London (or for that matter most urban agglomerations across the western world) will know about the glut of free newspapers available on public transport nowadays. In the morning you have Metro, which now has editions right across Europe. It fills the gap when you’re on a bus or train not looking forward to a another day in the office. Not exactly in-depth or full of expert analysis, but it is free. Being in an overcrowded train with a lack of reading material to hand can be a frustrating experience, so I’m all for free papers. In the City, there’s also a financial paper City AM which has news of the latest deals. mergers, acquisitions and all that stuff.
In the evening there’s the Standard Lite and The London Paper, which are more or less the same. The vendors often compete with each other outside the stations to see who can get rid of their pile first. The latter to its credit though has a section where readers can vent their spleen on any chosen topic of the day by submitting their own articles.
On Fridays there’s even a free sports paper. The problem is there are just too many papers. It takes me all week to read the Sunday paper alone, so all the free publications just pile up.
We live in a media-saturated society of 24 hour news, round the clock bulletins and information overload.
One free paper is enough. In any case it’s not as if your average commuter can’t afford one.

4 comments:

Antonio from Italy said...

I know Metro, it's distributed over here too. There are another couple of free papers and in one of these there's a space for readers where they can send an SMS to say a short opinion on a certain subject...
The paradoxical thing is that in this computer ruled world there's more paper around than before... Any news can be collected free of charge (and free of waste of paper) on the web, there's no need of all this free papers, apart from keeping us busy during our trip from home to the office.

Lady Fotherington-Smethers said...

It's the same with shampoos, types of breakfast cereal, careers and cat food. There is too much choice of everything. So much so that we are unable to make decisions easily anymore. And it is pointless except for the big businesses and corporates who convince us we need all these options.

The Daily Magnet said...

The more the merrier - we have only one daily paper, for a state the size of half of russia and it is a load of right-wing bollix & full of ads(the best part, they are). It's fun watching the editor get pinched over and over for contempt though. I love the idea of hard copy news written by anyone - is it available online?

I understand what you're saying about taking all week to read the Sunday paper, but see you're meant to just flick through the bullshit straight to the tv guide.

CW said...

Daily Magnet
Yes, the London Paper's available online at http://www.thelondonpaper.com/.
The right wing rag you mention sounds similar to the Daily Mail in Britain or the Irish Sunday Independent. Both are entertaining when you see how worked up they get about issues like immigration and denying that global warming exists.