When Metro first came to America, it came as something of a shock, a new idea in an industry, newspapers, where old ideas were deferred to, if not enshrined.

The new idea was a free paper, a daily tabloid, distributed through a subway system to reach the the young, those light readers who got their information elsewhere, from TV or the internet. Metro made its presence known by gaining an exclusive deal to distribute in Philadelphia Metro stations, to the consternation of the established dailies.

Metro caused a revolution. Imitators popped up all about, typically launched by a city's established daily and intended to head off a Metro launch. Free became, if not cool, darn near respectable. Within several years, the Examiner chain, extending Metro's notion, launched in San Francisco, then Washington and Baltimore, offering home distribution, in a direct challenge to those cities' dailies.

Then a funny thing happened. Metro seemed to go quiet, after launching papers in New York and Boston. It did not spread across the country, as so many had feared. What happened?

Quite a lot, actually, Metro would like to report. The chain, which is based in Sweden, claims itself a huge success in the U.S., reaching a readership many doubted it could: college-educated, affluent, employed readers. It also claims to be seeing double-digit growth in advertising in the past year alone. Further still, it claims to be shaking up traditional newspapers as much as ever.

It does so without an ounce of modesty.

"The idea of Metro is to evolve the newspaper business," says Daniel Magnus, publisher of the Metro in New York "I like to call it a daily rather than a newspaper. It looks like a newspaper, but if we were a newspaper our circulation would be shrinking instead of growing and our ad revenues would be shrinking instead of growing."

Says Magnus: "Metro looks at a market that has abandoned newspapers, the 18-39 market, and reaches them with tremendous success."

Working off of an editorial and business formula that has been implemented in more than 60 editions internationally, Metro launched in Philadelphia in 2000, Boston in 2001 and New York in 2004.

The slim tabloid promises a 15-minute read in brief sections covering news, sports, business, lifestyle topics and entertainment. Metro boxes are found along subway and bus lines, on college campuses, in office buildings and at retail outlets.

The result, says Magnus, is that his Metro has the youngest, most educated and most employed readership of any New York daily, outdoing even The New York Times. The New York Metro now claims a 325,000 average daily circulation, while Philadelphia claims 143,000 and Boston 170,000.

That in turn is leading to a flush of new advertisers, local and national, in real estate, travel, entertainment, finance, consumer electronics and fashion. It has featured the likes of the Gap and HBO on cover wraps.

"We're seeing a lot of growth across the board right now. As a paper in New York, we're seeing high double-digit growth this year, well above 70 percent, and that goes across the board on the national level," Magnus says. By comparison, newspaper ad spending in first quarter 2006 was up 0.3 percent from a year ago, according to recent Newspaper Association of America estimates.

But Metro has even more ambitious plans. Magnus says Metro U.S. is in the process of relaunching its web sites, and it still plans to expand to other cities, not deterred by the rise of the Examiner chain, which has vast ambitions of its own, or by the slew of subway papers, like the Washington Post's Express, that were launched to thwart its expansion.

But a big question looms regarding Metro. And that's over just how much of its growth claims are smoke. Metro declines to provide any actual financial data to back up Magnus's growth claims.

Doubters abound. John Morton, the longtime respected newspaper analyst, credits Metro with demonstrating the viability of free papers to some degree. He says, "Advertisers are becoming more comfortable with free newspapers, simply because now we've got quite a few, where we didn't have them before. Traditional advertisers would view free newspapers as throwaways, and I think they have changed their minds about that." 

But he doubts the chain is drawing many advertisers away from traditional newspapers, and he most seriously doubts the claim that the New York Metro has a more educated readership than the Times.

Newspaper consultant Dan McDonough, who also publishes New Jersey's Elauwit LLC group of free weeklies, says he does see Metro taking a bite out of mainstream papers' ad budgets, though likely not their readerships.

He says Metro's real issue, with its light local coverage and editorial content, may come when its target readers begin to rely on PDAs and cell phones for their quick-fix news.

"Fewer people are going to rely on small dailies for national and international news when they can grasp it online quite readily. For local news, nobody can beat the printed product," he says. "But it's going to be harder for the Metro to survive as electronic media become more prevalent and more convenient."

Morton, for his part, says that without the hard data, it's impossible to declare Metro the success Magnus claims it to be. "Even though it's been going for a few years it's not clear that it's overwhelmingly successful."