Metro is a free daily paper that is primarily distributed at train stations to commuters. It was started in 1999. As you might expect, all of their income comes from advertisements.
I was just thinking about them last week – I took a responsible social distancing walk to The Hague Centraal train station and spotted an empty Metro container. I remember thinking to myself that it made sense that there were no newspapers inside – there weren’t any commuters to be seen! The Netherlands has seen a roughly 85% drop in public transportation use since mid-March.
Because of this, the newspaper announced on March 19 (link in Dutch) that they would temporarily be stopping with the print edition of Metro. Yesterday they announced that they would be moving forward as a purely digital newspaper (link in Dutch).
It’s actually hard to imagine that the print version is gone. The best part about the paper was that it was free – because that meant people would leave it behind in the train when they were done reading it. That way the next bored person could have something to read as well!
The (cropped) image above was taken by Wikimedia Commons user Donald_Trung and can be viewed and downloaded at this Wikimedia Commons link.
Life in the Hague 