It all started on March 13th, 2008, when Poland’s free daily newspaper Metro run a front page story on uprising in Tibet.

We got a lot of letters from readers. They were angry about Chinese policy and they wanted to act. They asked editors for advice.

Metro responded with a call to send protest letters to the Chinese Embassy in Warsaw and attend street marches organised spontaneously in many Polish cities.

Leszek Blanik, Polish sportsman, appealed on the front page to his collegues and politicians to boycott the opening ceremony in Beijing. Other news media followed this appeal.

The first result came quickly: Poland’s president and prime minister both dropped their August trips to China.

Metro invited human rights activists to publish their appeals in the newspaper: for example a call to the European Union to appoint an European coordinator to the Tibet issue.

In March one of the readers sent us a small drawing, a project for a sticker that we call „vlepka” in Polish. Underground artists and activists put such stickers on walls to protest against any issue they find important.

Why not try to use this underground technique to show our support to Tibet and our disagreement with Chinese policy?

On March 28th Metro announced a competition for readers: ”A protest sticker for Tibet.”

We started to get tens of projects per day. We could not really stop the competition, as the new stickers were coming.

Adam Ostolski, a Warsaw sociologist, explained in an interview:

”The Tibet issue linked people of many generations and political views. They can disagree on a daily basis, but this issue made them to cooperate. Especially, young people feel that breaking human rights in China and Tibet is dangerous in a way also for their own freedom here, in Poland. That’s why they protest.”

Due to huge interest of young readers, Metro editors decided to increase their coverage of China and Tibet. It was an important choice, as this free daily has no more than 32-40 pages on an average day and less than 30 people in the newsroom, including designers.

In total, we got 500 projects of protest stickers. Most of the authors were younger than 30 years old: there were university students, secondary school pupils, but there were even younger participants.

The competition was run fully on the internet. Readers could simply design their sticker in any graphics application and upload an image to our website. Everybody could see a gallery of submitted entries and comment on them.

Quickly, we realised that the whole competition created a sort of a community of active readers.They were writing about their projects on their blogs, they were exchanging opinions on our website, they were learning more about China and Tibet and many got involved in protests organised by independent organisations.

On June 16th Metro opened an exhibition of the best stickers at its publisher’s headquarter in Warsaw. It was free for all the readers. They could come and read thank-you notes from persons like the Polish Senate speaker.

We invited also leading Polish graphicians and human-rights activists to the jury. On July 15th they could finally make a decision.

The 13 best stickers were published in a special supplement to Metro on August 7th. The winning one was printed also on a real sticker that handed to Metro readers on streets.

(Article based on information provided by Katarzyna Kesicka, Poland’s Metro editor responsible for this campaign.)

Metro is published by the Polish media group Agora. It was launched in 1998 as a weekly local supplement to the paid daily Gazeta Wyborcza in Warsaw. It evolved into an independent free-of-charge daily in 2001. Currently, it is distributed in 19 cities and its average circulation reaches 512 thousand copies.

In July 2008, the new editor-in-chief Waldemar Pas and the publisher Joanna Parczynska announced their plans to chang Metro’s editorial strategy. They wanted to focus more on readers up to 30 years old, an attractive and large demographics due to birth boom in 1980-90s.

”We give a priority to young generation’s problems that other [newspapers] neglect,” said Ms. Parczynska.

”We identify ourselves with this boom generation’s needs and aspirations,” added Mr. Pas.

They promised to invest in the newspaper’s contents, as they wanted Metro to become more and more quality-like daily: engaged in certain issues and actively taking part in a public debate.

They announced also a re-design of the newspaper (scheduled to August, 8th) and an advertising campaign in outdoor, newspapers, radio stations and online websites.

Here you see examples of Metro’s billboards:

The ad slogan reads ”Generation of Metro” and features staff members: journalists, editors, designers.

”We want to show that this newspaper is created by young people for young people,” explained Mr. Pas.

The quotes from the ads read: ”Sometimes one has to get off the boat”, ”Sometimes it’s hard to be humble”, ”I like to listen to people”.