DC Thomson confident as Metro pushes in to Dundee NEWSPAPERS:

0 Comments | Sunday Herald, The, Sep 30, 2007 | by Steven Vass Media Correspondent

IT is 5:30 in the morning. The streets of Dundee are lonely and empty, and a dawn chill pierces the air. Oor Wullie and Soapy Soutar are still presumably dreaming of catapults and apple trees in a distant corner of town.

Davie Carrell sits in his delivery van outside the railway station, waiting for the guard to open up so that he can make his drop. Having already called in at the bus station and several of the city's main hotels, he has just five batches of Metro newspapers left sitting in the rear.

Three will go into the iconic blue bins next to the station platforms, leaving a couple more for local hotels before he can start the drive back home to Glasgow.

He is a regular on the Metro night shift, which for the past eight years has seen copies picked up each night at around midnight from the Daily Record printing plant in Cardonald, Glasgow, and dispatched around the central belt.

But last week was the first time the paper had pushed further north into Dundee and also Perth. It represents the return of owner Associated Newspapers to the northeast, 18 months after selling Aberdeen Journals to Dundee incumbents and Oor Wullie creators DC Thomson. It is also this year's second Tayside skirmish by Scottish franchise holder Trinity Mirror, following the launch of the Dundee Record PM in January.

There are only around 5000 copies of Metro being dispatched into Dundee and Perth, a fraction of the 130,000 distributed in Scotland and the 1.4 million around the UK as a whole.

DC Thomson is still unlikely to be amused, however. From its sandstone stronghold in the centre of the city once famed for jute, jam and journalism, the shrewd, secretive company is not known for its welcoming attitude to competition. It has become so used to its near-monopoly on Tayside that it was deeply rattled by the threat of Record PM to its Evening Telegraph, and it seems to be reacting similarly this time around.

Moreover this looks like an advance guard, with plans to increase the circulation in Perth in the coming weeks and more incursions further north into Aberdeen and in-between towns such as Arbroath and Montrose mooted for next year.

Fast-forward several hours and blue and white mastheads are tucked under the arms of numerous people coming out of the station. The Polish man handing them out says they are not as easy to give away as he expected, but there still seems no shortage of curiosity.

"It's a bit sensationalist, isn't it?" complains one old man of the splash headline about hangover cures potentially being lethal.

"I hope there's a decent crossword, " says another of similar age.

Although most of the people who pick up the paper will presumably be the hip young urbanites at which it is aimed, DC Thomson is unlikely to be overjoyed at the thought of old people getting their hands on it.

It is people in this age group who are the main constituency of The Courier, Thomson's flagship paper, with almost half of the readers old enough to remember the second world war.

This will not be surprising to those familiar with the paper's olde worlde style, which blends light stories and local news with photos of weekend weddings and church fetes. Next to more cosmopolitan rivals, it can look like it belongs to a bygone age.

There is nothing small town about the sales figures, though. The Courier averaged daily sales of 74,938 in the first half of 2007, second only to Aberdeen's Press And Journal in the market for Scottish quality.

Although their figures are not directly comparable, The Herald managed only slightly over 70,000 in that period and The Scotsman was under 53,000. And while it is true that all titles have seen alarming declines in sales in recent years, thanks largely to the rise of the internet, the central belt titles are falling faster than those further north.

The threat to The Courier and perhaps later the P&J is that one of the reasons often proposed for the tougher market in the central belt is Metro.

Since the free tabloid launched in Scotland in late 1999, sales of the Herald and Scotsman have fallen 31-per cent and 33-per cent respectively, compared to 21-per cent and 20-per cent at the P&J and Courier.

This is no doubt why newsagents in Dundee were last week reporting visits from DC Thomson to find out whether there has been an effect on sales.

THE good news is that there are no signs of effects so far, and that there are numerous arguments against a Courier meltdown at the hands of Metro.

First and foremost, Metro is focused on an entirely different audience. While The Courier becomes less popular the younger the audience, around half of Metro readers are under 34.

Hence Mark Hollinshead, managing director of the Daily Record and Sunday Mail, who oversees the Scottish franchise, probably says with some justification that the immediate effect will be minimal.

He says: "We are looking to expand our young, affluent Metro audience. We have proved we can find a similar audience with Record PM, which has 80-per cent of readers under the age of 44 compared to 41-per cent of readers of the main Daily Record." Hollinshead also argues that rival papers will be unaffected in the longer term, claiming that while Metro may have had some initial effect on sales in the central belt, it has not had any in the past two to three years.