Connect: 'Dublin is one of Europe's leading capitals. It is our belief that Metro will complement the busy lifestyles of Dubliners and give advertisers an effective platform to reach a highly desirable demographic," said Pelle Tornberg, chief executive of Metro International. "Furthermore . . . this Irish venture will add to Metro International's already unique international footprint."
Good grief! "Platform", "demographic", "footprint" - it's ugly language to aggrandise flogging ads to commuters. Sadly, we can expect what Tornberg would presumably term "a continuing roll-out going forward" of this kind of jargon. The war of the "free newspapers" - really "free adsheets" or wannabe adsheets - arrived in Dublin this week.
Metro is a 40-page paper given away on weekday mornings outside mainline rail, Dart and Luas stations. Its aim is to kill the Evening Herald and wound the Daily Star.
Consequently, the Herald, which lost a High Court battle to use the word "metro" in its own giveaway title (the proposed Herald Metro), is publishing a 32-page free paper, Herald AM.
Metro is a first volley in a war for a huge chunk of the Irish market. The struggle is between Associated Newspapers - publisher of, among other titles, the Daily Mail, Mail on Sunday and Ireland on Sunday - and Independent News and Media - publisher of the Irish Independent, Sunday Independent, Evening Herald, Sunday World and the Daily Star, in which it has a 50 per cent share. It also owns 29 per cent of the Sunday Tribune.
The Metro and Herald AM freebies, however, are little more than an early skirmish in a looming war. Associated Newspapers plans to publish an Irish edition of the Daily Mail in the new year. This will attack the Irish Independent, still easily the best and most serious journalistically of the Independent group's Irish titles. That's when the row will become thoroughly bitter.
It all devalues journalism, of course. It's about business, not journalism, and, as ever, it is crucial to distinguish between the business of the media and the function of journalism. Tornberg's language, for instance, is the language of commerce. Likewise, that of Vincent Crowley, the chief executive of the Independent group's Irish newspaper operation. "We've researched the strategy and can move at a moment's notice," he said last month in anticipation of the Metro v Herald AM spat.
Like "platform", "demographic" and "footprint", "strategy" shows how readers are targeted not as citizens but as consumers or customers. There's hardly even any pretence now that papers can have a valuable social function.
The concentration of ownership of papers is killing journalism. The main detriment caused by this is to the public's ability to discriminate between what's really in their interest (the much derided "public interest") and what they are told is in their interest but is really (and increasingly so) in the interests of very rich people.
Sure, there have been newspaper circulation "wars" in the past and all sorts of devices have been used to attract readers. Principal among these have, of course, been sex and crime. But competitions with cash prizes, houses, cars, holidays and sundry other inducements have been offered too. Well-financed free papers however, on the scale of Metro and Herald AM, are new to Ireland.
Technically, both freebies look competent. Metro (printed by The Irish Times, which has a one-third stake in the venture) avoids being labelled a "red top" - red allegedly being the most visible colour on news-stands - by being a "blue top". The Evening Herald is a red top but the masthead for Herald AM is a mix of blue and red. Still, the sobering blue mastheads can't disguise the fact that these are really "adpapers" not "newspapers".
On Wednesday, for instance, the Herald AM front-page lead (un- bylined like most of its stories) read: "Misery for passengers as strikes to cripple airport". It was vintage Evening Herald style. Crime, union-bashing and alleged sympathy with the public (so long as it's good for business!) have long been Herald front-page staples. Herald AM simply followed suit.
Later that morning, the €1 Evening Herald went fully back to basics with a front-page poster headline in capital letters: "3 SHOT IN GUN CRIME WAVE". "Shot", "gun", "crime" and "wave" - all short and pungent words - are Herald favourites. The same day Metro led with the story that Ireland could be fined €600 million for exceeding greenhouse gas emissions. It almost seemed upmarket.
Still, neither of the new arrivals is anything more than, as Tornberg said, "platforms to reach a highly desirable demographic". In other words, they are adsheets for young people who travel to work and don't read newspapers anyway. Metro International publishes 58 daily editions in 19 countries. That is globalisation with a vengeance.
So much for the public interest!