Daily Competition

Apparently 24 Hours (a free daily produced by Quebecor Media, who also prints various Suns across Canada) is rising in popularity. I read an article in The Globe & Mail today about how "as much as 15 or 20 per cent of the content offered in Sun Media's paid dailies" were also printed in their free papers. It seems self-defeating, doesn't it?

And though I blogged about it a few weeks ago, I had no idea the market for dailies (both paid and free) was so fierce. So much so that the Winnipeg Free Press, is trying to head off 24 at the pass by producing their own Project Eclipse, aptly named '"because it's a Sun killer," Free Press publisher Andy Ritchie said.' I'd read the paper for the name alone.

As for our local dailies, I have been flipping through Rush Hour fairly consistently, and I'm finding it really sparse for content. I'm usually done scanning the extremely ad-infested pages in five minutes. If it weren't for the nice lady who hands out copies of the paper by my bus stop in the morning, I probably would have switched to 24 long ago. There really is something to be said for getting your paper from a person.