A PBS NewsHour with Jim Lehrer segment takes a closer look at two new D.C. tabloid-style freebies and how they’re impacting the “media landscape”: Express, a commuter daily that prints 260,000 copies; and the Examiner, a six-day-a-week paper soon to be at 200,000. The Examiner has a 54-person staff that targets local reporting and has double the pages of Express, which is designed specifically for 18 to 34-year-olds.

Editor-in-chief of the Examiner, John Wilpers: “This could be the biggest thing in newspapering since USA Today. We’re going to create newspaper habits and it’s going to be good for reading, it’s going to be good for democracy … People right now are so damn busy — the Post is a wonderful newspaper, but it’s just so damn big that not everybody can get through it.”

But Leonard Downie, Jr., editor of the Washington Post, is hoping the freebies don’t become alternatives. “What we’re mostly interested in and have succeeded so far according to our surveys of Express readers, in making into Express readers people who were not previously reading a newspaper. And I hope in the long run that it’ll translate then from Express into also reading the Washington Post.”

Then there’s the head of the Examiner’s D.C. staff, Karen DeWitt: “We’re going to take their lunch. We’re going to take their lunch from them, because I tell you, this is the wave of the future. We’re now on a 24/7 news cycle. You’re driving your car to work, you hear about international things, so we don’t really need to cover that as much. We’re looking for the stories that people aren’t seeing, that are just as important.”

Her message? Watch out, Len.

Source: PBS NewsHour with Jim Lehrer