Poor people never seem to think twice about having more babies (God sends them extra money when they do), and sure enough, my newspaper, The Nation — slammed against the debtor’s wall and bleeding red ink — spawned another mouth to feed last week and called it Free.

Actually the shudder-worthy name is Daily Xpress, and it was delivered by an alien. I was among those nominated to be wet nurses and, after only four days, I’m already feeling sucked dry.

The Xpress hit the streets on March 5 with many a punter placing bets on the date it’s going to hit the skids. No one is terribly optimistic, though you certainly wouldn’t know it from the cheery public promotions. As for me, I’ve been in the thick of this sort of thing once before, when the Hong Kong Standard suddenly became the Hong Kong iMail — with near-fatal results.

“Thailand’s first free English-language newspaper”, they claim of the Xpress.

That doesn’t sound right to me, but I’m too busy to quibble over that or the well-imbursed designers’ assurances that surveys taken here, there and everywhere definitively prove that this is what the modern newspaper reader wants:

* It’s small, but we’re avoiding the word “tabloid” because Britain’s News of the World and Sun own that sordid turf — ours is a “compact” paper. My contribution to a staff farewell to readers of The Nation’s now-defunct “Life” features section was, “Welcome to the future, please mind your head”, since the future is, you know, smaller.

* The presentation has to be all big, big pictures and many, many, many tiny but attention-grabbing bits and bytes of information, with “balconies” across the top of every page containing factoids like the percentage of rotten teeth in the average 10-year-old Thai kid’s head.

* It’s free, and the idea is that 100,000 copies are going to be handed out every day of the week and people will snag one, have a 20-minute breeze through while they’re riding the subway to work, and then either stuff it in their briefcase so they can consult the movie listings or do the sudoku later, or else leave it lying around for the next customer, of which there’s one born every minute.

* The target group is 25 to 35 years old — the generation born without an attention span — so no stories over 300 words. No one has actually come right out and told us to dumb down the content, but really, the content in most newspapers is already pretty dumb. All we’re doing now is saying stuff faster, before the kids wander off again to resume the Ragnarok game on their mobiles.

As of Friday night, mother and child were doing reasonably well. The Nation has a fresh look too, befitting “Thailand’s largest business daily”, as the new pitch goes. It’s dumped almost all of its featurish stuff on the Xpress to concentrate on business and finance with a smattering of politics.

To celebrate the birth of Xpress, advertisers bought up almost all of the pages, so there was even less editorial content than we’d planned, and then a couple of thousand of them went to our swank, multi-million-baht party called “W’Hot on earth is going on?” in the Centara cavern at Central World. It featured limbo dancing, fortune-telling and “some of the hottest musicians and bands”, although the main draw seemed to be the teenage sugar water from television’s frighteningly popular reality-talent-contest “Academy Fantasia”.

Daily Xpress photos in this post — thanks, fellas!

The bizarre name for the party derived from the chief theme of the promotional campaign, in which an alien kept turning up in silly print ads and a rather funny one on TV. I couldn’t decide which was weirder: suggesting than only freaks from space read Xpress or showing one of them going gaga when he sees pictures of sexy girls in it. (I use the word “sexy” in the ostensible sense, because the cover girl for our debut issue — a singer named Lydia who’s close to the former prime minister we can’t seem to get rid of — isn’t sexy. Actually she looks like an alien.)

“Free-sheet newspapers have started to arrive in Asia,” ran one of the promos, “with local-language editions in India, Korea [they mean South Korea, of course], Hong Kong and a dual-language English-Chinese edition in Singapore.”

The Bangkok Post read that and tried to muscle in on the action by whipping “a new look” onto its pages on Tuesday, “changes aimed at making our newspaper more reader-friendly”. Its managers have obviously been attending the same publishers’ seminars, because they talk the same daft language as ours: “Our front page will now serve as a ‘window’ to help you navigate through the newspaper more easily” … “more visual effects to create a bigger impact” … “blah blah” …

The Post, in a sweat, issued several pronouncements. In descending order of credibility: It always has been and still is “the best-selling English-language newspaper in Thailand”. It is “one of the few national newspapers in the world where the readership base is constantly growing”. And it is “the only newspaper in Thailand which has its circulation audited”.

Later this month the Post is expected to unveil a special Thursday edition called My Life that will look, uh, pretty much like Xpress, I’m betting.

This is Suthichai Yoon, who founded The Nation on July 1, 1971. He’s still pretty feisty but much more contemplative these days after watching his paper blossom into a media empire called the Nation Group and then dry up like yesterday’s tart. He’s crazy about online news and blogging, though, so he may actually be liking what he’s seeing in his cheeky little granddaughter.

Suthichai was only 25 years old when he declared on the front page of the first issue of The Nation that every newspaper “must have a moral justification for its existence”. His umbrage back then was based on Thailand’s two English-language dailies — the Post and the old Bangkok World — merging “under foreign ownership”, hence the need for the Thai-owned Nation. I’m not completely sure who owns what these days, but I think it’s been a long time since The Nation was last fully owned by Thais.

We’re not exactly off to a flying moral start with Xpress. “The Nation creates history,” was one of the headlines we used to announce the coming of the new tabloid. “History” in the sense that no English-language Thai daily has given away this many free copies before. The truth is that The Nation is dying a slow death and something very dramatic had to be devised as a last resort. So all this rot about revamping so that we can better serve our readers (”who we regard as smart, daring, knowledgeable and tech-savvy”) is extremely disingenuous. “There will be no duplication of content” in Xpress and The Nation, went another line, yet both had the exact same buzz on Thursday about Clinton’s win in Ohio and Texas. Lying isn’t moral.

How badly is The Nation hurting? I can’t remember the figure for how many billion baht per year we’re haemorrhaging, but all the buildings in Bangna where the paper grew up have been sold to recoup losses and we’ll soon be moving to much smaller rented premises, doubtless with many staff invited to bail out or at least work from home to save on air-conditioning and the like.

Nielsen Media Research (Thailand) says advertisers laid out Bt92 billion last year, of which 17% went to newspapers. They bought Bt15.8 billion worth of newspaper ads, and 10% of that went to the Post and The Nation. The Post is much older and much better established, so it got the lion’s share of that 10%. It also kisses government ass, so bastards like ex-premier Thaksin Shinawatra made sure the tax money for ads went there.

Thaksin’s got his nose back into things now, and his puppet-successor, Samak Sundaravej, is the kind of guy who’s off to Burma this week to sign an “investment-protection pact” with George Orwell’s generals. Businessmen here shouldn’t worry about the global boycott on doing deals with Rangoon, the Thai government actually had the balls to say, because it just means there’s a bigger slice of the pie for them! I don’t see a rosy future for the anti-dictatorship Nation.

Last September the Hong Kong Standard, where I worked in 2000 and 2001, downsized to tabloid format, took the $6 price tag off its front page and became that furiously lucrative city’s first and only free English-language newspaper. In place of the price tag it scrawled the hilarious motto “First Past the Post”, a jibe at its Goliath nemesis, the South China Morning Post.

The Internet was steamy with start-ups when I worked at the Standard, so someone got the bright idea that a revamped newspaper — small, flashy, geared to young people — would give the SCMP something to worry about. The whole paper was reborn as the Hong Kong iMail (”i” for interactive, in touch, blah, blah, blah).

This was quite a shock to the owners and shareholders, some of whom had been around since Tiger Balm tycoon Aw Boon Haw rolled out the first copy of the pro-Kuomingtang Hong Kong Tiger Standard in 1949 and gave the local colonial press a scare.

Aw Boon Haw’s adopted daughter Aw Sian, known as Sally Aw, was in charge when I was there and had by then made friends in Beijing. During the ’90s the Standard was the only Hong Kong English newspaper allowed into the mainland, but that too shifted once more around the time of the handover and both the Standard and the SCMP did their fair share of grumbling about Chinese rule. Then the SCMP saw that there was money to be made in China and stopped complaining, and now, once again, the Standard has too.

When the iMail brainstorm came along the Standard’s bosses must have thought, “Hey, why not?” I think it lasted eight months. In September 2001, just after the aliens flew their spacecraft into the World Trade Center and made global stock markets quake, the shareholders pulled the plug on the iMail. One morning all 100 members of the editorial staff received phonecalls or courier-delivered notices saying the newspaper, and their jobs, no longer existed.

I fled to Shanghai, but most of those who clung to Hong Kong were eventually given a second chance and taken back by the resuscitated Standard, as it was officially re-renamed in May 2002.

And now it’s all changed again.

Finally, about this “audited” business. Having your circulation “officially audited” seems to be akin to the official results of public-opinion surveys: they depend on the pollsters and the way they pose the questions. The Standard had an audited circulation that it waved at advertisers to show how far it could carry their message. Then in 1996 someone poking around on Wan Chai pier found 14,000 copies of the paper that were decidedly not being circulated.

The anti-corruption police discovered that the Standard had been lying about its circulation for three years and jailed three staff members. Sally Aw was initially charged as a co-conspirator but then the case against her was dropped “in the public interest”.

Being in charge of a newspaper that lies is not in the public interest.

I am not impaled on pessimism’s stake with regard to Xpress. The iMail was a lot of fun to make, and this one should be too. I’m just hoping it lasts, because I’m at cruising speed toward retirement and I really don’t want to have to find another job. And I sure as hell don’t want to go back to Shanghai.

Here is your official invitation to the Xpress launch party! Oh, wait, you’re too late.