With the freesheet battles blazing in the UK, and newspaper sales falling generally, it looks increasingly like the odds of successfully launching new national dailies are ever diminishing.
The last to try in the UK, the Sportsman in 2006, ended in disaster with millions lost and a circulation of just 40,000, but such tales of disaster have not stopped the publishers and editors of Público, which recently launched in Madrid and believe they can beat the odds in a generally moribund market.
This might be in part because unlike the rest of the West, Spain is not suffering a decline in newspaper sales. In the ten years to 2005 sales are up 2% on the back of Spain's economic boom. This has happened in concert with a free newspaper market, which has grown to around 5m in the last five years.
Público is a full-colour daily that sells for €0.50 (half that of its rivals) and is placing hopes of its success on targeting a young 25-45 age group with a bold left-leaning popular paper.
Ignacio Escolar, the newspaper's editor, told the New York Times that the Spanish newspaper market had been a failure over the past century and that following the fall of fascist dictator Franco in 1975 Spain had "set up a press that was highly politicized".
Público is different in other ways as well. There is no coverage of bullfights, no death notices and no ads for prostitutes, which are all familiar features of the Spanish press.
Unlike the UK where broadband penetration is high, it is still relatively low with 15 of every 100 households connected, which has to help Público, as does the lack of a tabloid newspaper market.
There is no popular equivalent of the Sun or Daily Mail; there isn't even a paper that sells a million copies out of the established big-name titles that most of us are familiar with such as El País (with which Público will compete head to head for liberal/left readers), ABC and El Mundo. It is these facts more than anything else that underscore how different the Spanish market is.
Jaume Roures, one of Público's backers and an executive of Mediapro, told the paper: "Freesheets have encouraged a lot of people to read every day, and we believe they are potential buyers of a second paper."
Gordon Macmillan
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