A recipe for hard times: The free papers are here

By Hector Bryant L. Macale

THEY’RE SHORT, colorful, fun, and easy to read. But can the country’s free commuter newspapers save what would appear to be a declining newspaper readership among Filipinos?

Well, it might be too early to say that. However, the proliferation of free commuter newspapers and the apparent success of the country’s first free daily Inquirer Libre indicate a change—a slow but seemingly sure one—in the landscape of the media business in the country.

The Philippines is just one of the many countries in the world where free newspapers exist. Such newspapers are produced especially for commuters on their way to work. Although there have been free newspapers in countries like the United States since the 1940s, the “classic” free commuter tabloid was “invented” in Sweden in 1995 with the launch of Metro, a 40-page, full-colored tabloid. Primarily distributed in metro train systems, Metro contains “bite-size” reports on national and international events with information on local entertain-ment, travel, and weather. The tabloid’s reports are much shorter than those in the usual broadsheets, letting readers finish the copy while aboard the commuter train.

Metro’s success in Sweden enabled its publisher to launch free papers in other countries, making it the world’s largest chain of free newspapers. At present, the tabloid has 69 daily editions in 93 major cities in 21 countries. Metro reaches 18.5 million people globally every day.

Worldwide, according to the online site Free Newspapers, Metro distributes more than 7 million copies daily, while other companies publish at least 14 million copies. These more than 20 million copies are “read by at least 45 million people daily,” wrote Dr. Piet Bakker, author of the Free Newspapers site. A Dutch veteran journalist, Bakker also teaches journalism at the University of Amsterdam.

All over the world, despite failures of Metro and other publishers in some markets, the success of free newspapers is felt everywhere. This is true even in the Philippines.

Dying market?
Inquirer Libre. Pasa ‘Yo. Filipino Journal. Star Alert. FreeMarket. These are some of the free tabloids primarily available in selected MRT (Manila Metro Rail Transit System) and LRT (Manila Light Rail Transit System) stations. Copies of Inquirer Libre, however, are also available at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport and at some bus terminals and piers in the metropolis.

These free tabloids exist amid the declining newspaper readership figures among Filipinos through the years. In the country, newspaper readership has been traditionally low, with most Filipinos relying on television and radio as sources of news and information as well as entertainment. The combined circulation of the Manila-based broadsheets and tabloids, including pass-on readership, is estimated to be about 7 million, journalism educator Ramon Tuazon wrote in his article, “The Print Media: A Tradition of Freedom.” In a country that has 76.5 million people (based on the 2000 figures of the National Statistics Office), 7 million means only about 9 percent of the population read. Outside the country’s capital, readership figures are much less.

According to the Newspaper and Magazine Dealers Association of the Philippines (MDAP), newspaper readership is steadily declining by no less than 10 percent every year.

“The decline could be attributed to the onset of news on the net and the fact that working people are becoming too busy with earning a living that they find reading the news of least importance and would rather just watch television and get (snippets) of the latest news,” an MDAP official was quoted in a July 2 report.

The official also added that a major factor behind the decline is the increased newspaper prices. “With the hard times, would-be buyers of newspapers would rather spend their money on food,” he says.

In a study presented last July 29, officials of Nielsen Media Research, a media research and analysis firm, also confirmed that the already low newspaper readership in the country is declining, attributing this to the cost of newspapers. Because of this, rival platforms for news delivery like TV and radio, on the other hand, “can be accessed by the public for free,” as noted by the Philippine Daily Inquirer.

The readership slump in the local print media is also felt elsewhere in the world. Various newspapers, some of them the top papers in their countries, have seen their circulation figures slipping dramatically.

Free newspapers, on the other hand, have increased their circulation in many markets worldwide, despite failures in some countries.

Beginnings
In the Philippines, the first free commuter tabloid to come out was Metro News, which was then owned by Dante Ang, a former Manila Times publisher and then adviser of former President Joseph Estrada. Launched in December 1999, Metro News started out as a government paper during the Estrada administration, according to a journalism thesis in UP Diliman about Inquirer Libre by Jeanne Cang and Angeli Alagcan (“Ride, Read, Run: A Case Study on Inquirer Libre,” March 2003). But after a few years of operation with a circulation of 50,000 copies (later reduced to 30,000), Metro News stopped publishing.

Metro News might be the first free commuter paper in the country, but it was the Inquirer Libre that made the concept of free commuter papers stick in the minds of commuters because it was published daily.

According to Chito dela Vega, editor in chief of the Inquirer Libre, among the reasons the Inquirer management decided to come up with the free tabloid Inquirer Libre was the declining readership among Filipinos.

“We are concerned because being the biggest paper, we are the ones that will be greatly affected by the declining readership figures,” says Dela Vega, who has been with the tabloid since its first issue came out on November 19, 2001.

He says that in a survey commissioned by the Inquirer, among the reasons behind the declining readership are the high newspaper cost and the newspapers’ penchant for politics, crime, and violence.

“It’s too negative, too much focused on politics and crime,” he says in Filipino. Aside from that survey, the Inquirer commissioned other studies before embarking on Inquirer Libre, Dela Vega adds.

Another reason behind the launch of Inquirer Libre is the management’s goal of reaching the broad C economic group.

Dela Vega’s views echo what Abelardo Ulanday, the tabloid’s first editor in chief, told readers in Inquirer Libre’s inaugural issue explaining  the newspaper. “Two reasons. First, we want to reach out to more readers. Second, we want to help cultivate the reading habit among the young and old alike,” he wrote.

“This is a big challenge, particularly with the onset of free and cable television and the Internet,” Ulan-day added. “Radio remains a stiff competitor, too.”

Feel-good paper
With the slogan “The best things in life are Libre,” Inquirer Libre usually comes out as an eight-page daily, although there are times when it comes out with as many as 16 pages because of heavy advertisement. With some pages in full color, the tabloid offers a rundown of the day’s events in Filipino and English as well as regular sections like the horoscope and weather sections. Practically all the tabloid’s short reports are sourced from its sister publication, the broadsheet Inquirer.

The easy-to-digest reports are often finished in a few paragraphs, enabling MRT and LRT riders, for example, to finish reading an issue in just 15 to 20 minutes, or about the time they use the trains to commute. Everyday, there are about 900,000 people who take the MRT and LRT.

Aside from the brief stories, Inquirer Libre (and the other free papers as well) has another distinctive feature: no opinion-editorial page.

“Inquirer Libre is a ‘feel-good’ newspaper,” Dela Vega says. He cites the results of their studies: its target readers do not want a paper that focuses on “bad news,”namely, politics and crime; and the tabloid’s contents should be light enough to be read in one commuter ride.

At present, there are 110,000 Inquirer Libre copies available to commuters from Monday to Friday. Quoting sources from the Inquirer, Cang and Alagcan wrote in their thesis that the tabloid’s normal pass-on readership is 400,000 or about one copy per four persons. On Fridays, the pass-on readership could reach 800,000 or double the normal pass-on readership. Less than a year after it was launched, Inquirer Libre won two Gold Quill Awards of Excellence in 2002.

Of the free tabloids, only the Inquirer Libre comes out almost daily. It is also the only paper that comes out regularly. The other free paper that came out regularly, the weekly Pasa’Yo, stopped publication in the last week of July this year. It, however, plans to do a relaunch on the second half of the year. The other publications are not regularly received by commuters.

Ad-driven paper
According to Dela Vega, financing a free tabloid like the Inquirer Libre is hard. He refuses to give specific figures to PJR Reports but says the tabloid is able to recoup its expenses from advertisements, Inquirer Libre’s main—if not only—source of revenue. Like other free papers elsewhere, advertisements drive the operations of these publications.

Its ability to survive justifies its cost, Dela Vega explains.

He also admits that initially, the Inquirer’s management feared the free tabloid would eat up the broadsheet’s market. But then, a later survey among Inquirer Libre readers showed otherwise. “Inquirer Libre readers are not Inquirer readers and Inquirer readers are not Inquirer Libre readers,” he says.

That means, he explained, that they are hitting their intended target: the people who do not buy or read the Inquirer but are aware of what the paper is.

Similar fears were raised when the management decided to come up with Inquirer Compact on Nov. 15 last year. A smaller version of the Inquirer broadsheet in terms of size and content, Inquirer Compact is sold in key areas of Luzon. Those fears, too, proved unfounded with studies showing that loyal broadsheet readers were not likely to shift, according to Inquirer officials (For more information about Inquirer Compact, read, “They shrank the paper: Inquirer goes Compact,” PJR Reports March 2006 issue).

Journalism, too?
Pasa ‘Yo may have stopped publishing now, but a relaunch in the second half of this year is being planned, paper officials Anthony Abaya and Vernise Victorio told PJR Reports in an interview. Abaya serves as the chair of Stratcomm Inc., the company behind Pasa ‘Yo, while Victorio is the paper’s managing director.

“It will be something different,” Victorio says. The revamped weekly tabloid will be in English but, according to Abaya, it might eventually follow the mixed Filipino-English format of the old Pasa ‘Yo, which stands for Para Sa Iyo, Ipasa Ninyo, Pasa Dyaryo.

“We might come out in two months; we might come out in two weeks. But definitely not in two years,” Abaya says, adding, “Watch out competition, because we’re going to be there.”

According to Abaya, Pasa ’Yo was conceptualized by his company two years ago after it noticed that commuter figure in MRT and LRT at that time was nearing 800,000 and that Inquirer Libre was supplying 100,000 copies only. And these copies are easily gobbled up, he added. “We thought that that’s not enough. Only one-eighth of the market is being served,” Abaya observes. Thus, Pasa ’Yo was created.

Like Inquirer Libre,  Pasa ’Yo is aimed at spreading the good news.

“Pasa ‘Yo is here to go beyond the air of negativism, apathy, cynicism, and despair that hover like smog coming from highly polluted air,” the management wrote in a special issue in November last year. Released in time for the Advertising Congress then taking place in Cebu City, the newspaper explained that it was time “for a change” to “collate and write only about what’s good in us, both as a people and as a nation.”

Strategist for presidents
Not a few in the press community had raised their eyebrows when Pasa ‘Yo came out. Abaya, a former campaign strategist of Fidel Ramos when the latter ran for president, is perceived as someone who remains close to Malacañang. This is because he also served as image strategist for Gloria Macapagal Arroyo in the 2004 elections.

Newsbreak wrote about Pasa ‘Yo in its “Inside Track” section on March 14, 2005. “In these hard times, Abaya must be loaded well enough to risk coming out with all these titles,” the magazine said, adding, “Unless, of course, he gets funding from the people who stand to benefit from all these feel-good stories. Last we heard, he assigned one staffer a single task: to write good stories emanating from Malacañang.”

Abaya’s namesake, Manila Standard Today columnist Antonio Abaya also wrote about the weekly on May 17 last year.

“Pasa ‘Yo is specifically designed to give a positive spin to the day’s news so that President Arroyo comes out looking good all the time,” he says. “Our very own version of Pravda,” he concluded.  Pravda was the Soviet newspaper that Western media had criticized for functioning as the government’s mouthpiece.

Reacting to these attacks, Abaya the strategist says he knew that the paper was going to be watched. “There had been insinuations that maybe we were being helped by the government,” he says. “But you will not find in Pasa ‘Yo a single ad from the government,” he points out.

According to him, that paper even has a policy that on its first year and a half, the paper will refuse government ads because he did not want people to think “that we in Pasa ‘Yo are part of the government,” he says. “Nobody can use us,” he claims.

He says that at the end of the day, the paper will have to get by on its own.

Defending the tabloid’s feel-good orientation, Abaya says, “Is there something wrong with deciding to come out with a Good Housekeeping-type magazine? Or a Better Homes and Gardens-type magazine? Or the Readers’ Digest? We decided to do that here.”

Doing well
Abaya and Victorio claim that  the paper had reached a five to six pass-on readership.  To support the tabloid, Abaya said the printer published the initial issue practically for free. After a few issues, the advertisements started coming in, he says.

“We didn’t have to wait, unlike Inquirer Libre, for one year and a half to break even. We broke even in the first quarter. That early,” Abaya says.

The brand name Pasa ‘Yo comes out with alternative titles each week. These are: Pasa ’Yo NewsPlus, Pasa ’Yo PeoplePlus, Pasa ’Yo SportsPlus, Pasa ’Yo Balanse, and Pasa ’Yo Special Supplements. Pasa ’Yo NewsPlus, for example, is available this week, but next week readers would see Pasa ’Yo PeoplePlus.

Printed in full color, the number of its pages differed depending on advertisements. The publication went from 8 to 20 pages.

According to Abaya, he was “pretty satisfied” with the market and the tabloid’s feedback from advertisers in the last two years. “(That’s why) when we come back—and we’ll come back with a vengeance—we’ll come out all in almost every nook and cranny of Metro Manila,” Abaya told PJR Reports.

Since advertisements primarily run the free papers, don’t these affect the editorial content of the paper? Both Pasa ’Yo and Inquirer Libre officials insist that these do not.

Dela Vega admits that ad-vertisements do affect the number of pages they can put in Inquirer Libre. Fewer ads mean fewer pages. The tabloid, he says, accepts advertorials (advertise-ments that appear like a news report) but it is made clear that these are advertorials.

Abaya and Victorio explain that they also received adverto-rial requests from advertisers. “That’s part of the advertising contract,” Abaya says.

Young and hopeful
For Dela Vega and Abaya, the industry of free papers in the country is still too young; thus it is too early to say if they would be a success in the Philippines.

According to Dela Vega, because of the heavy resources needed to publish free news-papers, only big media com-panies can put these up.

Abaya says that free publications can be successful in Metro Manila “provided that the economy grows.” He adds that the industry can grow if the advertising market similarly grows not just in Metro Manila but in other key cities in the country, too.

Dela Vega shares that view. As the lifeblood of these publica-tions, advertising would play a role in the success of the free newspapers, he says.

The success of free publications in the Philippines remains to be seen. But for now, to see Filipinos—who are not traditionally big fans of newspapers—reading on their way to work is a refreshing sight.

For Ronelo Bacolod, MRT operations director, agreeing to have free newspapers in the train stations was a no-brainer.

Referring to the memoranda of agreement between the Department of Transportation and Communications (the supervising government agency of the MRT) and the free newspapers, he told PJR Reports: “We agreed to it because, one, it will be at no cost to our commuters; two, it’s in line with our own public information and dissemination program.”
With about half a million commuters riding in the MRT everyday, Bacolod says, “Our ridership transforms into their readership.”

Free newspapers are allowed to be distributed in MRT stations provided that the management or the DOTC does not spend for this. Paper racks and the staff who bring in the papers are paid for by their publishers.

In return for space in the MRT stations, the free papers are asked to carry regular advertisements from the MRT management, Bacolod says.
But what do MRT commuters, as well as those who take the LRT stations, think about the free papers?

Most of the MRT and LRT commuters interviewed by PJR Reports say it is only Inquirer Libre that they get regularly.

A frequent LRT rider, Makati-based web developer James Adriano says tha he reads only certain sections of Inquirer Libre such as the horoscope and the comic sections.

News reports are the last ones he reads. Why? “Because I can get them from radio and TV,”

Adriano answers, adding, “And since I’m using the Internet everyday, I get the extra information from the news websites.”

He says, “If (readers) will only depend on Inquirer Libre’s articles, I’m sure the information that they would get is lacking.”

He compares the reports in the Inquirer Libre to a movie trailer which functions like a promotional material for people to read its broadsheet equivalent, the Philippine Daily Inquirer.
MRT commuter Rey de Leon says he still buys broadsheets like the Manila Bulletin even though he regularly gets to read Inquirer Libre. De Leon, a real estate agent, says that Inquirer Libre’s reports are concise. But if you want more detailed reports, you have to go to the broadsheets, he says.

Systems programmer and MRT rider Norlen Sumera admits that even though the information in Inquirer Libre is “lacking,” it’s the only paper she reads. She says she could rely on the tabloid because it is affiliated with the Inquirer.

But Jae Baltazar, a business analyst who gets the Inquirer Libre on his trips in the MRT, says, “Nobody takes a free paper seriously.”  As a result, he often buys the Inquirer, Bulletin, and The Philippine Star.

Baltazar thinks the free tabloid will not last long. “Quality news is in the broadsheets,” he says, adding that free papers can never replace the broadsheets as the preferred print source of news and information.- Hector Bryant L. Macale and Don Gil K. Carreon

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