If you’ve ever gone on public transit, regardless of where you are in the UK, you’re more than likely to have picked up a Metro; either by habit, or just to get yourself away from the mediocrity that is life.
But lately, I’ve come to realise something.
The Metro newspaper sucks.
Why?
Well, there isn’t any *real* content in the newspaper. There are articles mostly ripped off other newspaper’s, sometimes rewritten slightly, othertimes replaced by local newspaper articles; however the majority of the time you’re reading adverts. Tons of them.
The newspaper lacks from any real opinion too. Some might think that the lack of an editor, or a team of left-wing/right-wing contributors on the team is a good thing and that you can make a judgement about topical subjects yourself. But the thing is, it’s also a thinly guided way to give you stories without any social commentary, without any question; so it becomes a mouthpiece for the editor.
The stories are also very inconsequential, and are made for easy, quick reading that will bare no meaning once you’ve discarded the newspaper and gone on your merry way.
Another problem with it is that it creates a lot of rubbish. Now I’m guilty as the next person when it comes to stuffing metro newspapers down the sides of the Tyne and Wear Metro train carriages (as they’ve decided to remove all bins), but that just means they are printing way too many copies of the paper. How many metro newspaper’s are recycled? How many are just put on the junk pile along with the moutain’s of discarded fridges and washer dryers?
I’ve stopped picking them up from the “collect your metro here” collection points and instead rely on a discarded newspaper, usually one from the seat as not to pick up whatever crap was on the floor at the time. Every day the stories are almost always the same, in the same position, in the same boring layout without any real meaning.
The only good thing about the Metro is their website. Unlike the newspaper, it’s much more socially interactive, has a good fantasy football game which I play and allows commentary against the articles.
Indeed, in America, some news reporters are even saying that newspaper’s are a dying breed because so much is on the web, in the form of blogs, youtube videos, and the like; although I believe that newspapers will always have their place, I think that disserfication is the only true way that they can go.