A.M. New York

Okay, I’m getting yelled at for not keeping this updated….

They introduced a new newspaper a few weeks ago – A.M. New York. It’s free, it’s completely devoid of content, and it’s hawked by a bevy of no-doubt well-recompensed annoyances outside Penn Station. There’s really no reason whatsoever to read this thing, but it doesn’t stop them from trying.

The great thing, though, is that they’re obviously not allowed to leave until they give away all of their papers. In the beginning, they were “selling” it with calls like “Top news story! Top news story!” That wasn’t working when you could buy Newsday for a quarter next to them. So they cleverly switched tactics to “Free news! Don’t cost you nothing! Free news!” Of course, this begged the question of what value it had. So today, there’s a driving rainstorm. Combining the value proposition of freeness with the tactile honesty of print, several A.M. New York vendors have adopted a new pitch: “A.M. New York! You can use it to keep dry! You don’t got an umbrella!”