The ''Birmingham Daily News'', Europe's first

free daily newspaper Free newspapers are distributed Gratis versus libre, free of charge, often in central places in cities and towns, on public transport, with other newspapers, or separately door-to-door. The revenues of such newspapers are based on advertising. Th ...

,Birmingham reunion planned
Holdthefrontpage was launched in

Birmingham Birmingham ( ) is a City status in the United Kingdom, city and metropolitan borough in the metropolitan county of West Midlands (county), West Midlands in England. It is the second-largest city in the United Kingdom with a population of 1. ...

, England in October 1984. The paper was created by local entrepreneurs

Chris Bullivant Chris Bullivant Sr is a British newspaper publisher who with his wife Pat launched the UK's first free daily title, the ''Birmingham Daily News, Daily News'', in October 1984. Having set up in excess of 74 newspapers, the Bullivants have now so ...

and his wife Pat, and was edited by David Scott. It was published from offices at Five Ways and delivered free to 276,000 houses around the

and

Solihull Solihull (, or ) is a market town and the administrative centre of the wider Metropolitan Borough of Solihull in West Midlands County, England. The town had a population of 126,577 at the 2021 Census. Solihull is situated on the River Blyth ...

areas. Reed Regional Newspapers, part of the media giant

Reed Elsevier RELX plc (pronounced "Rel-ex") is a British multinational information and analytics company headquartered in London, England. Its businesses provide scientific, technical and medical information and analytics; legal information and analytics; ...

, bought a 51 per cent stake in the paper in 1987. Although it operated profitably for many years the ''Daily News'' suffered from the decline in advertising revenue during the early nineties recession. Production was reduced to weekly in June 1991 with the newspaper retitled ''Birmingham Metronews''. This in turn was relaunched as a daily publication in 2000 as the Midland edition of the

Metro Metro, short for metropolitan, may refer to: Geography * Metro (city), a city in Indonesia * A metropolitan area, the populated region including and surrounding an urban center Public transport * Rapid transit, a passenger railway in an urb ...

group, distributed free of charge to commuters travelling by public transport.

References

Notes Bibliography * Publications established in 1984 Newspapers published in Birmingham, West Midlands Daily newspapers published in the United Kingdom {{England-newspaper-stub