DAG

» see dag.nl as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

DAG only made sense if you were standing on a Dutch railway platform at eight in the morning. The free daily was a commuter format, printed for people held still between a turnstile and a seat, and it was funded entirely by the fact that they had nothing else to look at for nineteen minutes. That is a distribution model before it is a newspaper.

It launched on 8 May 2007, owned jointly by KPN, the Dutch telephone incumbent, and PCM Uitgevers, which published de Volkskrant and most of the serious press in the country. The idea was cross-media, and in 2007 that word still had money behind it. The paper would be short and the website would be long. You would read a headline in the tabloid, then finish the story on dag.nl or on your phone, and KPN would supply the pipe.

Circulation moved fast. 325,000 copies by June, 400,000 a day by September once a Saturday edition was added, handed out at stations and pushed into supermarkets. On paper that is a national newspaper. In practice DAG had walked into the middle of the Dutch free-paper war. Metro and Sp!ts had been giving copies away since 1999, and De Pers launched the same spring DAG did, which left four titles competing for one commuter and one advertiser.

The Turkish newspaper i grew up next to was one you bought. The free press i saw was promotional, something attached to a purchase or a campaign rather than a standalone daily with an editorial staff, and the commuter rhythm that makes this format work was not really there either. A paper handed to you at a barrier is a specifically Northern European object, and DAG is what happens when the object gets built by people who own the barrier.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it landed ~

Badly, and quickly. The multimedia half never behaved as promised, because a reader who is given a free paper is not a reader looking for more of it on a screen. Within six months KPN had withdrawn from the content side, which left PCM running a newspaper it had partly designed around a partner that was no longer there. Bob Witman was editor in chief.

So they rebuilt it inside its first year. More Volkskrant copy went in, the photography was cut back, the design changed and the multimedia emphasis was quietly dropped. What emerged was a shorter free version of a paper PCM already published, which is a rational response to a failing product and also an admission that the original idea had been the whole reason for making it.

~ how it actually ended ~

The end came on 29 September 2008 with the announcement, and on 1 October with the last printed issue. Timing was part of it. The autumn of 2008 was not a season in which anybody was funding an experimental advertising-supported daily, and the Dutch free-paper market consolidated hard over the following years until Metro was the only one still standing.

The website outlived the paper by exactly a year and stopped on 1 October 2009. The archive stayed reachable a while longer, then went too, on 23 June 2010. Three shutdown dates for one newspaper, each one quieter than the last.

~ what came after ~

PCM lost at least twenty million euros on it. There was a second, uglier number circling the same story: PCM had negotiated in 2006 with the investor Marcel Boekhoorn about a free paper and then declined to work with him, after which he launched De Pers on his own and a damages claim of roughly ninety six million euros was raised against the publisher. DAG cost the company money twice, once by existing and once by the way it came to exist.

The lesson everybody drew was about free newspapers, and it was the wrong lesson. What DAG actually tested was whether print could be used as a funnel into a website, and the answer turned out to be no, not because readers cannot follow a link but because a reader who paid nothing owes you nothing. Every publisher that later tried to convert a free audience into a digital one ran the same experiment on a bigger budget and got the same result.

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