By Marcela Valente
BUENOS AIRES, May 18 2000 (IPS)

A new “pocket newspaper” distributed free of charge to bus passengers in the Argentine capital has built on the success of a previous experiment, and is providing a source of information to the thousands who gave up buying the paper due to the expense involved.

The 16-page ‘Pocket Daily’ measures 14 by 37 cms and provides full-colour reports on politics, the economy and sports, few ads, a theatre section and TV guide, as well as weather reports, the winning numbers of the national and provincial lotteries, and interesting facts on the history of Buenos Aires, a city of around 10 million.

Market research carried out prior to the launch of the new publication indicated that a full 60 percent of Argentina’s population of 37 million did not regularly buy a daily paper, due mainly to the strain on their pocketbooks.

That led many kiosks and cornershops, barbershops, carwashes and gas stations to begin to offer free newspapers or magazines to their clients.

Today, interested readers can peruse the ‘Pocket Daily’ at their leisure – a publication financed by advertising and contracts for exclusive distribution in specially chosen busy areas.

At first, people riding the buses in Buenos Aires reluctantly accepted the complimentary copies, wondering what the catch was. But the paper soon gained widespread acceptance, and bus passengers began to seek it out, to ease their long commutes to work.

The journalistic director of the project, Martín Warmerdan, told IPS that 250,000 copies a day were printed Monday through Friday since its Apr 10 launch, and that the idea was to boost that number to 450,000 as of July.

That is an ambitious goal, given that Argentina’s traditional daily papers sell 30,000 to 60,000 copies a day at a pricetag of one to two pesos (on par with the dollar).

But experts say the ‘Pocket Daily’ will not hurt the conventional papers, just as the posting of papers on the Internet did not harm sales, because the initiative targets readers who no longer purchase newspapers.

“We began distributing the paper on 38 bus routes in the greater Buenos Aires, and soon we will sign a contract with 20 other lines,” besides delivering papers to supermarkets, gas stations, universities and taxi stops, said Warmerdan.

The idea of free newspapers has already caught on elsewhere in Latin America. In Santiago, Chile, for example, the Swedish company Metro carried out a short experiment of its own.

Nor it is new to Buenos Aires, where ‘La Razón’ began putting out a – normal size – complimentary version of its daily paper in trains and large markets.

Under the slogan “Nuestros lectores tienen La Razón” (Our Readers Have ‘La Razón’ or Are Right, a play of words on the paper’s name), the initial one-year campaign by the newspaper was printing some 230,000 free copies a day. But distribution is now limited to specific sites.

The company that publishes ‘Clarín’, Argentina’s most widely- read daily newspaper, is also considering the possibility of producing a complimentary copy for distribution in the mass transit system, markets and toll-booths on privately-run highways.

“The important thing is that we confirmed that there is room for a free daily paper in Buenos Aires,” as well as the fact that advertising in the free copy of ‘La Razón’ doubled in the space of a year, said Sergio Spadone, the editor of the paper’s free version.

Warmerdan said the aim of the ‘Pocket Daily’ is to finance itself through advertising.

“We believe this is a sufficiently attractive project from the point of view of design, content and circulation for advertisers to seriously consider the possibility of selling through us,” he said.

The idea, he added, is to increase the number of pages from the current 16 to 32, which would still allow a small enough size for it to be distributed as a “pocket” newspaper.

Readers, who no longer need to peer over the shoulder of their fellow passengers to read the paper, can fold the ‘Pocket Daily’ in half – to a size of 14 by 19 cms – to make it even more practical to carry.

“I had grown accustomed to getting the news from the radio before going to work in the morning, and from TV at night when I got home,” Amelia Gómez, age 52, told IPS. “But now I’m reading this little newspaper, and it’s another matter altogether – I can get more details on the issues that interest me.”

Gómez takes the newspaper home so her husband, who is retired, can read it too. But soon he will be able to get his own free copy at a business in his neighbourhood, or perhaps even delivered to his door every morning.

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