Ultimately, a lot of the interview is strict bashing of London Paper’s direct rival, London Lite, launched by the London Evening Standard in retaliation to News International’s venture.

Both papers’ circulation has been shoulder to shoulder, although more recently the London Paper rose to 487,000, according to Hatfield, while London Lite’s remained at 400,000.

While much of the interview almost seems like a propaganda piece against the “spoiler” Lite, here are a few quotes from Hatfield that give useful information on London’s current newspaper market and freesheet war:

"Their (London Lite) January sale will be more than December's, because January is always more than December. In January 2006 they were selling 277,000. By December, the paid-for sale was just over 209,000. Their bulk sales have gone from 30,000 to sometimes more than 50,000. So, yeah, you can keep hiding the figure to the outside world by adding on bulks, but advertisers aren't stupid.”

About the city councils’ decision that newspapers should pay for the clean-up costs of their waste:

"We're trying to solve it together. Every single person we've got on the streets is responsible for cleaning up the waste. They all have sacks. We accept that we're out there in the world with crisp packets and chewing gum, that's why we have an advertising campaign about recycling in our own paper and ask our readers to recycle.”

A word to justify free papers as being valuable newspapers:

"Free papers acknowledge the realities of young people's lives and, pretty much everywhere in the world, they are politically neutral. All the research shows that young people dislike political bias in newspapers and they are sick of being preached at by journalists. That's why they don't want to read columnists either."

"In the end it's surely better that every day - with us, Metro, the Lite and City AM - more than 1.6 million people are reading newspapers who otherwise might not have done so. How can that be bad for the business?"

Source: Media Guardian