Newspaper free-for-all: former Post publisher spearheads national daily giveaway trend.

• Author: Schwab, Robert
• Position: Ryan McKibben

Ryan McKibben, former publisher of The Denver Post, was named chief executive officer of Clarity Media Group in early 2005, putting him in charge of what another Denver-area newspaper executive describes as "a major, grand experiment," the rise of free metro daily newspapers across the country. Clarity is the Philip Anschutz-owned, Denver-based company that has started three free daily newspapers in San Francisco, Washington D.C., and Baltimore, newspapers with a full complement of local news, editorials, sports and entertainment coverage, real estate and automotive classified ads, even coupons, with a combined weekday circulation of 623,000 copies in the three cities. On weekends, the San Francisco Examiner drops 381,000 copies all by itself, and McKibben says Clarity is considering increasing the drops across all three cities it now serves.

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"Forty percent of people read a legacy newspaper," McKibben said in an interview with ColoradoBiz. He was referring to a paid-subscription, traditional metropolitan-area newspaper like his old Denver Post, the Rocky Mountain News or the Chicago Tribune. "That leaves 60 percent of the people who don't," McKibben added. "It's a big marketplace--and if you look at the 25- to 49-year-olds (prime advertiser targets), that percent (of readers) is much lower than 40 percent.

"That's a significant amount of people and size of the market.

"There's opportunity for a different product."

Free newspapers have been around a very long time in the form of suburban weeklies, alternative newspapers, shoppers, fliers and even posters.

H. Harrison Cochran, publisher of the Aurora Sentinel & Daily Sun and president of Aurora Publishing Co., has been twice president of Suburban Newspapers of America, a trade group for suburban newspapers, and is currently serving on its board and as its representative to the National Newspaper Association. He says large American newspaper companies, publishers of The New York Times, The Washington Post and Chicago's Tribune, are throwing big money at publishing free newspapers right now in an attempt to shore up falling numbers of subscribers to their paid journals.

The trend, Cochran says, addresses what is happening to American newspaper readers across the nation. "People reading what they want, when they want, and when they have time," he said. It's a phenomenon that is putting extraordinary pressure on traditional media, especially traditional newspapers, including Colorado's two major metropolitan dailies, The Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News.

Last month, ColoradoBiz analyzed the success of the joint operating agreement (JOA) forged between the two dailies five years ago, and concluded the joint venture was working well for its partners, but not necessarily as well for readers and advertisers in the Colorado market. That examination did not touch on the free-newspaper phenomenon, although Clarity is based in Denver, owned by Anschutz, and its presence here has already spurred Dean Singleton, publisher of The Post, to request that the U.S. Justice Department, monitors of the Denver JOA, approve distribution of a future free edition of The Post. The Denver Newspaper Agency, which is the operating company for the two Denver newspapers' business ventures, has yet to announce any imminent plans to launch such an issue. Clarity Media, however, secured the rights to a free newspaper it could call the Denver Examiner at the same time it similarly...