E-Mail This Article to a Friend Echo chamber, continued
	Related Links   Metro International This is the site for the company that created the Boston version of Metro and publishes daily editions in 19 countries throughout the world. Niche Voyager This section of the Newspaper Association of America Web site keeps track of the new publications aimed at 18-to-34-year-old readers.

DROPPING THE RACE BOMB

In January, a story broke that two Metro executives had made racially offensive remarks at company events overseas. That generated big headlines in the Boston Herald, which was fighting the Times/Metro merger. It led to allegations of an insensitive and flawed corporate culture, unearthed reports of employee discrimination complaints against Metro Boston, provoked criticism from some members of the local black community, and forced Times Company executives to take a harder look at the people they were partnering with.

Despite that uncomfortable controversy, the Times Company’s $16.5 million acquisition of a 49 percent share of Metro Boston was completed in March, and the Globe and its parent company had a major toehold in the biggest experiment in newspaper journalism. From Boston to Chicago and from New York to Washington, media companies are creating or investing in easily digestible papers that offer shorthand versions of the news aimed at young urbanites and commuters. Metro readership stats (they claim nearly a quarter-million daily readers in Boston) indicate almost 80 percent are between 18 and 49. One Globe advertising executive says the Metro attracts about 200,000 daily readers who don’t pick up the Globe, with about half of those in that golden demographic between 18 and 34.

Pat Urban, a 25-year-old media planner at a Boston ad agency who reads the Metro every day on his 25-minute bus commute from South Boston — and who doesn’t read the Globe or Herald on a daily basis — is a fairly typical Metro user. "It’s laid out kind of like an Internet site," he says. "It’s real quick. Boom, boom, boom."

Officials are bullish about the paper’s prospects. In an earnings conference call last week, Times Company CEO Janet Robinson said Metro Boston "had its best month ever during the third quarter." Globe/Metro packages have in fact brought new advertisers such as Target, Jet Blue, and CVS into the free daily tabloid.

So is the Metro doing any damage to the other Boston tabloid? Herald editorial director Ken Chandler says "my assessment is that [Metro has] had almost no impact on the Herald. Although it’s free, in my view it’s overpriced." But those sentiments are at odds with what Herald publisher Patrick Purcell said when he asked the Justice Department to intervene in the Metro/Times deal and warned that the merger "will drastically alter the landscape of newspaper publishing in Boston."

Anybody who takes public transportation in Boston will see that the tabloid of choice for straphangers these days is the Metro. And with the Herald having recently embarked on a series of major cuts and Purcell acknowledging that the company could be sold, the question of Metro’s clout in the Boston newspaper market becomes more critical.

Metro’s Boston operation has not only teamed with the dominant local paper — albeit one suffering from serious revenue and circulation problems — but it’s now part of the biggest brand name in American newspapering. That should be cause for celebration. Instead, you get paranoia. What else can you call a newspaper company that treats the press as an enemy?

And how else can you feel about a secretive and largely anonymous operation that wants to fly below the radar screen? How do you avoid concluding that Metro Boston is simply a local outpost in an international cut-and-paste journalism factory and that its officials are Stepford executives following the dictates of a hierarchical and arrogant corporate culture? (As a Globe story reported, the company’s CEO has said that "Metro is doing for newspapers what McDonald’s did for fast food.")

Last year, the Globe produced a lengthy examination of Metro after the tales of its executives’ racist remarks became public. The piece quoted a former company sales manager saying, "As far as racism, there is no story. But if you are talking about being idiots, then there is a story."

Maybe that’s why Metro works so hard to make sure there is no story.

Mark Jurkowitz can be reached at mjurkowitz[a]phx.com.