Every morning, I pass anywhere from 6 to 10 hawkers pushing either The Metro or the recently introduced and horribly named Boston NOW. Even leaving aside the fact that both of these free dailies produce effectively meaningless content - the one posts verbatim from the news wire and the other borrows two week old stories and uninspired blog items - the sheer amount of effort that is being put in pushing the papers is becoming difficult to accept.

I get it. The papers are locked in a struggle to get in front of as many eyes as they can so they can justify their existence through advertising revenue. That's pretty easy to piece together. The level of aggressiveness that's being shown, however, is starting to put me off to both papers. Not only have I had to dodge around hawkers strategically placed to block access to the stands for still other papers (most notably, the Phoenix), I've had to ask one to move on multiple occasions because he was blocking the exit from the T station. Today, three hawkers in a line had all but cordoned Winter Street. It's like Panhandling - EXTREME!

The crazy thing is that it occurs to me, each and every time I pass them, that their goals could be achieved just by stacking all of the papers in the trash. It'd still count as papers in circulation, and that's where all they end up anyway.

...unless you're grabbing them for the free sudoku.