History
The paper was launched in London in 1999, and can now be found in several UK urban centres, plus some smaller railway stations. Localised editions are produced for Birmingham, Brighton, Bristol, Cardiff, Derby, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Leeds, Leicester, Liverpool, London, Manchester, Nottingham, Newcastle and Sheffield. It is part of the same media group as the Daily Mail and The Mail on Sunday, although in some areas, the paper operates as a franchise with a local newspaper publisher, rather than as a wholly owned concern.
The Metro concept comes from Sweden. Metro International, a different company, launched in the UK in 1999 and in Newcastle upon Tyne was distributed side by side with the Associated Newspapers' version on the Tyne and Wear Metro system. After battling alongside the Associated Newspapers' version with the same name, it changed its name to Morning News. It was short-lived, however, and Morning News was discontinued shortly afterwards (see Metro International). They have had plans to launch a rivalling free evening newspaper in London. Similarly, Rupert Murdoch is said to have regretted missing the opportunity of launching his own London paper. However, News International, a UK subsidiary of Murdoch's News Corporation, launched a London-based newspaper in 2006 called thelondonpaper. This was closed on 18 September 2009.
Read more about this topic: Metro (British newspaper)
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“It gives me the greatest pleasure to say, as I do from the bottom of my heart, that never in the history of the country, in any crisis and under any conditions, have our Jewish fellow citizens failed to live up to the highest standards of citizenship and patriotism.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)
“What we call National-Socialism is the poisonous perversion of ideas which have a long history in German intellectual life.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)
“The History of the world is not the theatre of happiness. Periods of happiness are blank pages in it, for they are periods of harmony—periods when the antithesis is in abeyance.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)