World's Worst Newspaper Hits London

It's 7:30am, London Waterloo. Thousands of bleary-eyed commuters shuffle in unison, attempting to delay the day's inevitable office-bound grind. Most of this suit-clad crowd avoid eye contact at all costs - with their head's buried deep within the morning's news. City Boys grasp their pink sheets, idealistic graduates survey The Guardian and lads ogle The Sun. This scene, it seems, has been played out for eternity.

But in 1999, things began to change. The Metro was launched as a free colour newspaper and was distributed among the capital's commuters. This offered readers a selection of short, unoriginal news stories hidden within a mass of celebrity gossip, sport and entertainment. Following the success of the Metro, a variety of cost-free imitators soon emerged. CITY AM for the financially-minded, the London Paper for the absent-minded and the now sadly-deceased London Lite for the feeble-minded. Even the Evening Standard, under the helm of the former KBG spy Alexander Lebedev, joined the party in October last year by dropping its cover charge of 50p.

And now London has got a new free sheet, the London Weekly - a newspaper so bad that many industry figures believed it was a public relations stunt. Shrouded in mystery, the London Weekly published its first ever edition last week - complete with numerous typos, spelling mistakes and a mundane front page splash about Wasps Rugby Club. Described by Steve Busfield, former news editor at guardian.co.uk, as "with doubt the worst front page lead I have ever seen in any newspaper of any format, shape, size or distribution", the story was even lifted word-for-word from a press release.

The paper's many other highlights include its top five albums of the week, with only four albums; spelling Phil Tufnell's name incorrectly as Tufnel on the front cover; an article entitled What Happened When Pasta Met Sauce; and a design so awful it appears to have been drawn up a group of four-year-olds with felt-tip pens. All-in-all, the London Weekly appears to have completely forgotten that to produce a newspaper they might have to employ trained journalists and sub-editors.

After a less than glorious opening, executives at the London Weekly, which is owned by the Invincible Group, have today attempted to fight back against their many critics with the release of the second edition.

However, the paper has still not managed to shake off the doubt that it is a terrible parody of an awful student newspaper dreamed up by advertising men. The front page story this week is actually about themselves. Entitled Pot Calling the Kettle Black, the story criticises the BBC for refusing to disclose the pay of its top owners, after the beeb reported on the mystery surrounding the private details of the London Weekly's benefactors.

This seems a little self-indulgent. The story is basically a rant about the negative media coverage the paper has received, which nobody outside of the Invincible Media Group really cares about.

For those lucky enough to obtain a copy, the second edition was as abhorrently awful as the first. Its writers continued to show a basic lack of grammatical knowledge that journalism first-year students would be scolded for. As an example, the sentence structure and spelling mistakes in the first paragraph are almost laughable for a newspaper with a target distribution of 1.5 million.

"The BBC who ran a news piece last week criticizing The London Weekly for not disclosing any private details were themselves in the spotlight this week for refusing to disclose it's top earners. The irony is, when we tried to get in touch for an interview, comment, or quote from the Beeb. There was no one to come forward for an interview."

Beyond the sniping about apostrophes and "7 things you never knew about Ginger Beer" features, the main question raised by the London Weekly is will people read it? Some commuters would rather gouge their own eyes out then be forced to read the adverts adorning tube walls. And this paper is free and has some, albeit questionable, content.

Its publishers will be hoping that a policy of not employing experienced reporters or sub-editors is a masterstroke. If the London Weekly can continue to attract enough readers to catch the attention of advertisers then why bother with such trivial pursuits as finding original, well-researched stories or a decent newspaper design. Here's hoping that this business model is not successful - as it could have wider implications for newspapers everywhere.