London Briefing/Chris Johns: Just as the morning rush hour draws to a close, a major clean-up operation is often to be observed on many of London Underground's tube trains.

Hundreds, if not thousands, of copies of the daily free newspaper, Metro, have to be cleared away from the floors, ledges and seats of the trains.

Metro is distributed at the entrances to most of the capital's stations and is very popular with tube and bus commuters. It is a curious aspect of human behaviour that none of them ever seem to want to be seen carrying one of these papers into the office. If you pay for your newspaper it gets taken into work and, sooner or later, finds its way into the bin. Metro's fate is to end up as a litter headache for London Transport. Even the tabloids are treated with more respect by their readers.

Metro is blamed for all sorts of things, not just mess and waste. Rupert Murdoch, who owns most of the newspapers and televisions channels watched in Britain these days, is apparently annoyed with Metro, blaming a 40,000 slide in the circulation of the Sun on the existence of the freesheet.

London's Evening Standard has responded to all of this by experimenting with a free paper of its own, timed to be distributed well before most regular purchasers have left the office but after they have left their copy of Metro on the bus.

The cleaners of London's buses and trains now have even more reason to despair. Metro has been joined by another free newspaper, called City A.M. I guess the name says it all: this is a paper aimed at City workers, the most affluent in the country.

According to the blurb accompanying the launch of the latest free offering, the target audience works in a "village" comprising, "exclusively" the City (London's financial district, also known, inaccurately, as the Square Mile) and Canary Wharf.

Geographically, at least, that's an odd-looking village (two wholly separate bits of London). Moreover, it seems to miss out the area where the most affluent of all financial professionals work, the West End, which is where all the hedge funds are.

City A.M. is designed for a "young, affluent and professional" audience (I wonder which newspaper sees itself as catering to the old, poor and amateur bits of London). The title reckons the number of City workers is now 400,000, up over 50 per cent in the past decade, and is on its way to 500,000 in the next few years.

Statistics are a wonderful thing and I'll bet that potential advertisers in City A.M. will be impressed by the numbers showing that, in London, over $500 billion (€408 billion) of foreign exchange is traded every day (mostly, it has to be said, by a handful of people and a lot of computers) and £2,600 billion of assets are watched over by a small army of fund managers.

City A.M.'s presentation to potential advertisers also points out that the average incomes of the City professional are nearly two and a half times the national average, and these people apparently read a newspaper either at lunchtime or in the average 31 minutes they spend between "arriving in the City and starting work".

Like all other media channels, City A.M. has to confront the fact that most professionals get most of their information from screen-based delivery systems.

This was true before the advent of the internet - we were all glued to Reuters and Bloomberg screens long before the web came along - but the ubiquity of free (or near-free) information has meant that investment professionals don't look to the Financial Times, let alone a freesheet, for news.

Hence the decline of the FT - and, indeed, most of Fleet Street.

A man who single-handedly manages about $25 billion for one of the largest financial institutions in the world once suggested to me that the buying power that goes with that kind of money means there are no facts of which he is unaware. That immodest claim is probably correct: there is an army of global researchers at his fingertips. If there is information out there, he has access to it instantaneously.

But what he was willing to pay for, given his all-embracing knowledge of facts, is opinion. Preferably of a high-quality kind, of course, but opinion nonetheless.

This is what City A.M. is missing: finance professionals don't buy newspapers to acquire information. They are willing to pay for lots of other things, but not the stuff they usually see before the newspapers are printed.