While the print side of the newspaper business continues to decline, Toronto’s Metro with circulation in Halifax, Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver looks towards online to try to capture a larger online market share. Metronews.ca and journalmetro.com have each received a make-over including a social media play that allows the publication to leverage blogs, online video and RSS feeds for each columnist.
According to Bill McDonald, Publisher, Metro English Canada, “While headlines are dominated by trouble in the newspaper industry,
Metro is a rare good news story. Our print readership continues its steady climb and we remain committed to investing in new platforms.” What would be interesting to know is how is their online portion of the business doing? It is great to see a small adoption of various social media tools, but they are about a year late to the part as other newspapers such as Globe & Mail and National Post have already been through one or two rebrands in the last two years. Another key component they are missing from their online strategy is leverage Twitter. With news that Twitter’s traffic has recently surpassed that of Digg the potential to put Metro’s content where the eye balls are is a definite missed opportunity.
Visually, I will say that I like the new look but just hope they improve their overall strategy and start to really use the tools that are available.
Chris Tindal, Metro’s interactive content manager, wrote a short blog post about this last week.
http://www.christindal.ca/2009/01/15/what-ive-been-up-to/