An American Newspaper in Paris, 1976–78
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On the streets of Paris I sold the coolest American newspaper ever published in Europe
[EXCLUSIVE TO MEDIUM]
Like Jean Seberg in Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless, I spent some time in my early 20s sauntering up and down the Champs-Élysées in a sexy logo T-shirt hawking an English-language publication. Not the venerable Herald-Tribune, though: a new bi-weekly started by American journalists, called The Paris Metro.
The founding publisher-editor of The Metro was a young guy in his 30s named Tom Moore. Five years earlier Tom had been the leg man for a shared-byline story about a spectacular bank robbery in Brooklyn. The story was published in Life Magazine…
…and was quickly sold to Sidney Lumet’s production company, who came out with this classic movie, three years later:
With his cut of the proceeds from the sale, Tom traveled to Paris to realize his teenage dream: to enjoy the good life in Paris with a beautiful French woman by his side, and to write about it.
With a couple of journalist cohorts, he founded a city magazine for Paris, a tabloid bi-weekly they launched in June, 1976. It was a good time for city magazines, which in the 70s were cropping up like mushrooms — Boston’s Phoenix, Chicago’s Reader, LA’s Weekly, etc. The ones that lasted were able to last by working the winning three-pronged combination: 1) comprehensive arts and culture coverage; 2) informed, relevant political pieces; 3) sexy classified ads.
Armed with that formula and a close group of writer friends, The Metro was launched in a quiet neighborhood of Paris, the 4th arrondissement.
Art director Christina de Liagre, in The Paris Metro 40th Anniversary Issue (Freelance Ink Books 2016), recalls:
