E-Mail This Article to a Friend Echo chamber What’s black and white and silent? The Metro. BY MARK JURKOWITZ

This started out as a story about the Metro — Boston’s four-year-old easy-to-read free daily tabloid — and what its philosophy and partnership with the Boston Globe/New York Times Company might say about the future of journalism in the 21st century.

My assignment was to talk with the Metro’s Boston officials and to convey to readers a sense of the people, principles, and priorities that drive the local division of a major international operation that publishes 59 daily editions in 19 countries. The story was conceived largely as a positive look at the Metro phenomenon in Boston, not an adversarial piece of muckraking journalism.

There was one problem. No one at Metro’s Boston operation would talk. I tried to find out what happens inside the fifth-floor offices of a building it shares with corporate sibling Boston.com. It would have been easier to waltz into the White House Situation Room in the middle of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The folks on the Metro masthead are a mystery. I’d never talked with Peggy Onstad, the publisher, so that seemed like a good place to start. A phone call failed to reach her. Then, during a conversation with Saul Williams, an editor in the Boston office, I was told that I should speak to Robert Powers, managing director of Metro US. Six phone calls to Powers over two days went unanswered.

So eventually, I headed down to Metro’s Boston offices, which seemed inviting enough. An eye-catching green "BOSTON METRO" sign hung over the reception desk, which is adjacent to a glassed-in conference room showcasing Metro front pages from all over the world. Informed that Onstad was not on the premises, I wrote a note to her explaining my interest in an interview and my futile efforts to talk to Powers. A pleasant receptionist promised to deliver the message. I never heard back.

On my eighth attempt I finally managed to reach Powers, but he was brusque, cranky, and unhappy. When I requested an interview with Metro’s Boston executives, he said no. When I asked why, he said: "As a matter of company policy, we don’t provide interviews to people in the press." When I asked how a newspaper could have a policy of not speaking to newspapers, he repeated the policy.

I inquired why he did not return my calls. "I’m a busy guy," he barked. "It wasn’t my highest priority."

I’ll say this. You have to admire Metro Boston’s message discipline. (Even the Bush administration could take some lessons.)

A few weeks ago, when I had a question about possible staff reductions at Metro Boston, a Globe spokesman told me the person I needed to call was Onstad — yes, the same woman who doesn’t return phone calls. When I tried to secure an interview and get details about some of Metro’s public financial data, I was steered to Powers — yes, the "busy guy" who can’t be bothered. It’s a pretty airtight Catch-22 they’ve got going on there.

So this is not really a story examining Metro’s growing strength in the Boston market. Instead, it’s a reprise of the suspicions that surrounded Metro culture a little less than a year ago, soon after the New York Times Company announced plans to buy a stake in the little upstart that threatened the market for Boston’s dailies.