what would bird flu do to the free sheets?

Free newspapers, often read by commuters and left behind for others to pick up, sneeze and cough on, and read, could be one of the ways that bird flu could, were it to hit a major city, be quickly transmitted from person to person. How, I wonder, would the freesheets cover such an outbreak and, in particular, what advice would they give to readers? What strategies would they employ to keep their audiences despite the danger of reader to reader transmission of the outbreak?

Freesheets have, over the last few years, appeared in most large cities. They’re often distributed at, or immediately outside of, major transportation hubs. In cities like London, where two freesheets launched almost simultaneously at the end of August, the competition is such that competing titles are literally thrust into your hands outside tube stations.

Bird Flu may have dropped down the news agenda, but a pandemic outbreak is still a grave threat, not just because it could lead to thousands, hundreds of thousands, or perhaps even millions of deaths, but also because such an outbreak could lead to economic and political unrest around the world. Battles could be fought in the streets outside hospitals, martial law could be imposed, financial markets could crash… enough of the doom and gloom, it’s far too sunny of an Autumn day for all that.

Anyway, distribution numbers are, of course, important to the Freesheets. But advertisers also know that most freesheets are left behind on tube trains by their readers, picked up by someone else and then left behind again in a cycle that takes the paper far down the line from where it was distributed. When the two new freesheets launched in London not long ago, Transport for London blamed them for a massive increase in the amount of rubbish collected by cleaners and for subsequent delays on several routes when cleaning took longer than expected. Likewise, in New York, freesheets have reportedly added up to 15 tonnes of rubbish a day and have even been blamed for blocking drains and causing flooding on an underground rail line. And in Finland there is fear that freesheets are leading to deforestation and other problems. Freesheets also could erode the circulation figures of paid for newspapers – as they seem to be doing to London’s Evening Standard, which has seen circulation decline since the launch of it’s own London Lite and News International’s thelondonpaper.

But what if bird flu hit London? We already know that the Government has discussed plans to shut down the tube and other transportation networks in the event of a major bird flu outbreak. But what about in the days or weeks at the beginning of such an outbreak, when the transportation networks are still running. Just as people sneeze or cough into their hands, then hold a hand rail on the train, so to do readers of freesheets. How would the freesheets go about covering the danger of passing bird flu in this way, from reader to reader?

One short term strategy might be to ignore the risk or skirt around it, explaining in general that people should avoid touching things that may have been touched by someone who has been infected. This could turn out to be quite short-sighted – what if readers of their paper died off at a much higher rate than the general public? But would the freesheets really go as far to publish suggestions that people might be wise to avoid touching, holding, reading, and taking home of their newspaper? Perhaps each freesheet would come with a sachet of Purell, a sanitizer favoured by politicians, including George Bush, Dick Cheney and Barack Obama – probably the only time you’ll see those three listed together – who shake lots of hands on the campaign trail. Or maybe there would be encouragements to “pick up your own” alongside warnings to “get rid of it, don’t share it”, thus stopping not just the potential spread of bird flu from reader to reader, but also stopping freesheet readers from returning to the newsstand to buy their very own sterile copy of a traditional newspaper. Perhaps they’d turn to the internet as their distribution channel, offering, as some other UK newspapers already do, a download-and-print version for commuters.

I desperately hope, of course, that the danger of a bird flu pandemic has been overblown and that it never happens, but if it does, the freesheets are certainly going to have some challenging editorial dilemmas to deal with. It might, however, be an entirely academic debate since the financial, social, and political unrest that would likely accompany any major outbreak of bird flu would probably lead to a disruption, if not ceasation, of normal commerical activities anyway.

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