Every morning, we cater to young, affluent and time-poor professionals who need to keep themselves informed about business, finance and investment and who also enjoy lifestyle features and sports. We make our publication available to our readers at a growing number of train and Underground stations in London, or directly to their offices, at no cost.
City AM offers a comprehensive yet concise, well-presented and graphics-rich overview of all the City and economics stories that matter.
Thanks to our late deadlines - we go to press at 1am - we are able to include many stories that other publications miss. The result is that our readers can brief themselves more quickly on the business stories relevant to them by reading City AM than through any other combination of media.
We also break exclusive, market-moving stories, such as the news of Tesco's plans to buy RBS's personal finance unit, Shire Pharmaceutical's departure from the UK, or the latest skirmishes in the Informa takeover battle.
Last but not least, we are a newspaper for London's business community: the City is truly our parish. Every day, we interview City professionals in the streets of London, as well as senior analysts, executives and entrepreneurs. We emphasise the personalities behind every story, and chronicle the social lives of our readers.
With our revenues up strongly in the first eight months of the year, we have many exciting plans. We are planning to boost our distribution further in London and to increase availability in the suburbs. And, early next year, we hope to begin distributing in at least one major town outside London to take our paper national.
The media landscape is changing very quickly, with the fastest evolution taking place in the battle for the commuter - but the success of City AM has proved that quality journalism delivered in a contemporary format is the only way forward.
- Allister Heath, editor, City AM.
Despite the growing trend for a better work-life balance, Britons are showing no sign of scaling back their lengthy journeys to work.
Kinetic estimates the length of the average Briton's commute has almost doubled from 35 minutes in 2003 to 1hr 5 mins in 2008, while TouchPoints places the average journey time at an exhausting 1hr 44mins.
While the increased time spent commuting may be bad news for Britain's workforce - Londoners spend the equivalent of one whole month per year commuting - it is good news for advertisers, who have longer to bombard Britons with marketing messages.
Even better, commuters see their journeys to work as a "time to get things done", according to CBS Outdoor's Britain on the Move research - and their focused and receptive frame of mind means advertisers can have a clear idea of what type of message they can hit people with, and what commuters are likely to take in.
New ways of reaching the high-calibre commuting audience - almost 60% of whom are ABC1s - include Titan's 106 digital six-sheets across major London railway stations, due to be rolled out by the end of this month; the steady growth of wi-fi access on trains and in stations, and, of course, the digital transformation on the Tube, where CBS plans to locate more than 2,000 digital screens across 30 stations.
Meanwhile, freesheets are now an established part of the commuter experience, with more than two out of three readers in London claiming they would miss free newspapers if they were no longer available, according to a YouGov poll.
So whether you are looking at booking a cover-wrap on Metro or City AM, running a Bluetooth campaign at Liverpool Street station, or targeting affluent, cosmopolitan travellers at Europe's longest champagne bar at the newly reopened St Pancras station, there are more ways to reach the UK's mobile population than ever before.
As Anthony Waithe, head of research at CBS, confirms: "Britain is indeed a country on the move, and Britons are showing no sign of standing still soon."
- Harriet Dennys, features editor, Media Week