Worldwide, it's a mega-trend, the rise in free dailies challenging older, established paid-circulation newspapers. Free papers are already big in Europe, and more are launching in the U.S. in cities like Washington, New York and Chicago.

But the trend is hardly confined just to major markets.

Free dailies are popping up in towns you'd have to pull out a map to find, like Bluffton, S.C., and Eureka, Calif., and in impressive numbers.
 
There are now some 39 free daily newspapers in the U.S., and 12 of those have been launched in the past seven years, since 2000. Most have been launched in small towns.

Typically, the big-city free dailies, the Metro chain, for example, target the elusive non-reader segment, 18- to 35-year-olds, with light, entertainment-related stories. Call it journalism lite.

Not so the small-town freebies. They target the same broad audience of the paid dailies they're often competing with, and their editorial focus is hyperlocal news.

What makes the free small-town dailies viable? They have the advantage of controlling their circulation, and setting it at levels that make them attractive to advertisers. And these days advertisers are far more open to putting their ad dollars into free publications.

Free dailies are also spared the cost and trouble of maintaining entire departments charged with collecting on paid subscriptions, and they're typically less dependent on classified ads.

That's turned out to be a real advantage at a time when paid dailies are seeing revenues tanking in both areas, observes David Cook, publisher of the Aspen Daily News, one of the older free dailies, founded nearly 30 years ago.

“What was a disadvantage throughout the ‘90s has put us in a very competitive position today because we don’t rely on revenue that’s in a freefall just because of the nature of this type of media,” he says.

The News, with its circulation averaging 14,500 and serving a population of about 20,000, is one of three free dailies in and around Aspen, Colo.

It's a unique market. There are in fact no paid-subscription newspapers in the area because of the difficulty of delivering to the area’s remote homes. The paper relies on racks set up around the three counties it serves.

Cook sees more free papers arising, and one force he credits is the internet. “There’s so much with the electronic world forcing people to abandon circulation as a revenue stream,” Cook says. “I think all the big cities in the West will see a huge trend toward free distribution.”

But the key advantage to launching a free daily is the ability to attract an immediate readership, making the paper attractive to advertisers, versus the long, slow process of building paid circulation, which is expensive and can take years.

Example: Today, a free daily in Bluffton, S.C., near Hilton Head, that launched in April 2005 to take advantage of the area's growth.

“It would take years for a paid daily to attract the 18,000 buyers that Today has attracted almost overnight with free distribution,” observes newspaper consultant Henry Scott of Gansevoort Media of New York. “That's because you've removed price as an obstacle to trial for someone who might otherwise not pick up the newspaper.”

Today offers advertiser saturation circulation.

“Young people read Bluffton Today in numbers higher than any other market we serve," says Jim Smith, vice president of market research for Morris Communications, Today’s parent, which also publishes 26 other daily papers, including The Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle and Jacksonville’s Florida Times-Union. "We are all about Bluffton all the time. That’s our niche.”

Bluffton Today charges ad rates close to those of the paid competition, and it can do so because it was able to sell its viability to advertisers in pretty short order. Smith argues that the whole notion of paid circulation as an indication of a newspaper’s wantedness is an outmoded concept.

Out in California, the Eureka Reporter was born out of a web site started in August 2004. After six months, it began printing as a free weekly, and in January 2006 it went daily with a circulation of about 10,000.

The family-owned paper’s philosophy is that no one should have to pay for news about their community and that ad rates should be kept affordable so that small businesses can flourish.

“We’ve gone back to basics,” says Judi Pollace, publisher. “This is what a community newspaper was 100 years ago. We’re hyperlocal. That’s why everyone loves the paper.”

By all indications the philosophy is working.

Bolstered by ad rates that are kept in line with circulation at $17 an inch, compared with the competition’s $27-an-inch rate, the Reporter’s ad sales are up. So is circulation, to 25,000. That puts it ahead of its paid competition at 19,000, after just two and one half years.

And that bodes well for the launch of yet more free dailies in smaller U.S. markets.

As Scott of Gansevoort Media observes, "The ability to quickly build a large audience helps in quickly attracting advertising revenue. And the ability to outsource printing and distribution holds down the capital cost of starting a newspaper."