Jens Torpe might not be the smiliest man in media but he is nonetheless in jubilant spirits - and who can blame him?
City AM, which he launched with Lawson Muncaster about 18 months ago, has just topped 100,000 circulation for the second month in a row. The paper broke an exclusive on a private equity bid for Jaguar last week. And it has just completed research showing that, among other impressive results, its dwell time has nearly tripled from the average 10 minutes to 28 minutes.
So it's been a good couple of weeks in the paper's London Bridge offices. Muncaster's enthusiasm is more palpable as he bounds through reception, but this is typical of the unlikely pairing between the affable Scot and the more reserved Dane.
As Muncaster puts it, Torpe is the "brains" of the operation while he's the "brawn".
There is little doubting Torpe's enormous contribution to the paper's success. With years of experience in the international free newspaper market - he was with Metro International from day one - he was a prime candidate to unleash a free paper onto London's streets.
Of course, when City AM launched in September 2005 there was already a major player in the market - Associated's Metro, which has since become ubiquitous on the city's buses, Tubes and trains.
Village paper
With such a powerful presence already owning the morning market, Torpe and Muncaster took a different approach, choosing to target the affluent young gaggle of City boys and girls with a "village" paper full of bite-sized business and financial news, as well as lifestyle, features and sport.
It has proved a winning formula, both for its readers - who average 36 years of age with a salary of £77,000 - and for advertisers, who are attracted by such a young and lucrative audience.
What differentiated it from Metro International was that it had its own journalists, instead of taking content from news wires, and it took a niche approach, rather than going for mass-market appeal.
Torpe believes that herein lies the future of the free market. When the paper launched, he predicted that "two parallel newspaper markets will exist in five to 10 years - one free and one paid-for. The free market will evolve... with up to nine titles, many of them covering a particular niche".
Since then, of course, two new papers have exploded into the market - and are still battling it out for supremacy among homeward bound commuters.
It's still anyone's guess whether Associated's London Lite or News International's thelondonpaper will emerge as the victor.
But while the battle rages on, Torpe thinks other potential players are holding fire, hoping to learn from their ringside view.
"My feeling is there's a waiting game, where people would like to see how the two papers do, because it's such a massive new investment," he says. "One thing it has proved is one of the main questions we were asked before the launch. People doubted there would be room for anything; I was certain there'd be an audience for 800,000 to one million papers - and that's proved correct."
New entrants
He is still confident the market has room for several more titles, but that any new entrants would do well to aim for the more receptive morning crowd, and with something much more targeted.
"You might say sport is a potential niche," he suggests. "The magazine Sport (distributed free at stations in the city) is weekly, but there's so much going on and people in Britain are so interested in sport.
"During the football season it's phenomenal the amount of coverage around the Premier League - it's just one area you might think there's a chance to have a daily paper and have a very high pick-up."
He wasn't always such an advocate of free papers, however. Before joining Metro International, he confesses he was convinced "papers were dead". He wasn't the only one.
"When we took Metro outside Sweden, all the publishers had a laugh and thought it was a stupid idea," he remembers.
Safe to say they were proved wrong and most reacted by launching their own free versions - something the UK has not done.
"If I look at mainland Europe today, a lot of those titles will close in two years. There's a limit to how many papers there can be. The way it's grown here is more sound and sensible," he contends.
Until someone else takes the leap, City AM is happy to take advantage of readers looking for more than just a mass-market read in the morning and Torpe is confident that, as long as they're in the right place at the right time, the paper will grow.
"It's about content, packaging and availability," he say. "When people don't have to go out of their way, they do want a paper."
Those latest ABC figures certainly suggest he's right
CV
2005 Chief executive, City AM
1999 Chief operating officer, Metro International
1997 President, TV3 Broadcasting Group (Modern Times Group)
1992 Managing director, TV3 Broadcasting, Denmark
1984 Marketing director, Politiken Newspaper Group
1978 Sales manager/director, Politiken Newspaper Group
1977 Head of research, Politiken Newspaper Group, Copenhagen
1975 MBA, Danish School of Business, Aarhus.