An English
Urban National
newspaper owned by
Associated Newspapers (publishers of The
London Evening Standard,
The Daily Mail and
The Mail on Sunday).
First launched in March 1999 in London, Metro is available at tube and train stations free of charge on weekday mornings.
The paper was originally launched as a spoiler to prevent another company getting a stranglehold on the lucrative commuter market, and to protect the Evening Standard's circulation.
By owning both publications, Associated Newspapers is able to remove copies of the Metro at 9/30 a.m., before the first copies of the Evening Standard hit the streets.
Metro is the first quality freesheet to be published in the U.K. and is funded entirely by advertising. Having no political bias (though the Conservative nature of the publisher does tend to place it slightly right of centre), Metro is designed to give people a 20-30 minute read while commuting to work, informing them of the major stories of the day in short factual bursts of editorial content.
The phenomenal success of Metro in London led to sister titles being published in Manchester, Newcastle, Birmingham, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Leeds and Sheffield and the title sits somewhere between the broadsheets and the mid-markets.
Metro won joint Brand of The Year at The Media Week Awards 1999, with Sky TV, and Media Coup of the Year, and currently has a circulation of nearly 800,000.