Wonder what happens to news when a Luxembourg-based company starts writing your local paper and those in 80 other cities? What should be a savvy guide to your city starts sounding like a lost tourist. Consider this recent item in the free commuter-daily Metro New York: "Tell us about where you live. If you live outside Manhattan and commute into the city, we would like to hear more about your life outside New York City and profile your home. …
write us at home@metro.us"

Two centuries ago, Metro could have been excused for confusing Manhattan with New York City. But ever since the five-borough city was constituted in 1898, only tourist maps and new New Yorkers would make that mix-up.

Lots of local papers are owned by media conglomerates, but they usually have local staff handle local coverage. Metro instead needs geography lessons from readers. This is the same paper that recently ran a column by a Toronto teenager offering his unusual opinions about the New York City subway system—based on a whole summer of commuting research. A paper whose crossword clues usually read like they were transported in a time machine from 1985: A recent clue, apparently written by someone oblivious of a guy named Martinez, was "Slugger ____ Guerrero." (Answer here.) This is the same paper that runs news-wire stories for almost all of its news content, which is dwarfed by advertorial and other fluff. And here's good news from Forbes: Metro has 81 papers, out of at least 135 similar freebies worldwide, including the best-read papers in London and Manhattan (not New York City).

These papers were envisioned brilliantly by the character Whelpdale in George Gissing's New Grub Street, even before New York City became New York. (Google Print, Amazon) Whelpdale, a true pioneer in disrespecting his audience, suggests renaming the magazine Chat to Chit-Chat and revamping the format:

No article in the paper is to measure more than two inches in length, and every inch must be broken into at least two paragraphs. …
Let me explain my principle. I would have the paper address itself to the quarter-educated; that is to say, the great new generation that is being turned out by the Board schools, the young men and women who can just read, but are incapable of sustained attention. People of this kind want something to occupy them in trains and on 'buses and trams. As a rule they care for no newspapers except the Sunday ones; what they want is the lightest and frothiest of chit-chatty information—bits of stories, bits of description, bits of scandal, bits of jokes, bits of statistics, bits of foolery. Am I not right? Everything must be very short, two inches at the utmost; their attention can't sustain itself beyond two inches. Even chat is too solid for them: they want chit-chat. …
When people had been attracted by these devices, they would find a few things that were really profitable. We would give nicely written little accounts of exemplary careers, of heroic deeds, and so on. Of course nothing whatever that could be really demoralising—cela va sans dire.