Newspaper Innovation

Pelle Anderson, one of the founding fathers of Metro Stockholm in 1995, participated in the launch of the free daily GASTE (related to Gazette: newspaper) in Istanbul on February 11. The paper has a print run of 500,000 which made it the market leader in the city overnight.

Publisher is Free News of which Anderson is CEO. From the website the pdf’s of all editions so far can be downloaded - in nr. 1 (February 11) GASTE and Anderson are presenting themselves.

The new paper is printed in tabloid - most newspapers in Turkey are still broadsheet - and counts 28 to 32 pages in full color. It already claims more than 50% of the readership in Istanbul.

As a reaction local daily Hürriyet launched on 21 February free daily 20DK - short for 20 Dakika (20 minutes), a paper of which the print run is said to be 300,000.

With 500,000 GASTE is the fourth newspaper in Turkey after Posta, Zaman and Hürriyet. Total circulation in Turkey is 5 million. Only Mempo (Moscow) and Metro and the londonpaper (London) have a higher print run in one city in Europe.

So far Turkey had no free dailies, although Istanbul was perfectly fit for a launch. The city has good public transport, a lively city center, and good economic perspectives. 80% of the Turkish newspaper sales is in single copies.

Turkey is the 55th country with free newspapers, the 32th European country with free daily newspapers. Total world circulation of free dailies has now increased to 43 million.

There are 15 million people living in the Istanbul area, in which half of the Turkish economy is concentrated.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 13th, 2008 at 6:37 pm and is filed under Launches. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.