Read all about it. A free daily newspaper is debuting today in Manchester to cover the city up close - and rival the New Hampshire Union Leader.

The Manchester Daily Express, a 16-page morning tabloid, will publish Monday through Friday and will be available across the city, publisher Jody Reese said yesterday. The Daily Express will print 3,000 papers a day and hopes to expand to 9,000 in three months.

The Manchester Daily Express will be published by HippoPress LLC, the same company that produces the free arts and entertainment weekly TheHippo. According to Reese, it will have much the same purpose: filling a void. Reese, 32, said the Union Leader is stretched so thinly throughout the state that local goings-on in Manchester get missed.

"There is no Manchester daily paper right now," said Reese, a former Union Leader correspondent. "There's a statewide paper that has an office in Manchester, but there's no one doing city politics or doing a good job covering business. We have three major high schools in the city, and they get very cursory coverage right now."

The free paper's business strategy flows along the same lines. Reese said there is currently no place for mom-and-pop Manchester businesses to advertise to a local audience, without paying high radio or Union Leader rates.

"There's a real demand out there for advertisers to advertise just in their small trade area," he said.

Joe McQuaid, publisher of the Union Leader, called Reese's assessment of his paper's Manchester coverage "nonsense," and he said the paper's city coverage was "second to none, and it will continue to be so."

But McQuaid said he's certainly watching the new freebie. "We watch any possible competition that comes to town. I see any other news media as a challenge, and we'll act appropriately," he said. Beyond that, he declined to specify.

"My words will have to speak for themselves. I'm not about to explain to the Concord Monitorexactly what we intend to do."

HippoPress is making a profit on the Hippo, which is published in Manchester, Nashua and Concord. The company also recently started a men's bimonthly tabloid called Oxx.

The Daily Express has made a quick trip from drawing board to printing press. Reese said the Hippo publishers seriously thought of the idea only two months ago. Most employees have been on staff for four weeks. Ad sales began last Thursday.

It's a matter of "very little sleep," Reese said. "We're that type of organization. . . . We thrive on being quick about things. It doesn't take us a lot of time."

The Daily Express is assuming its readers don't have tons of time either. The paper is casting itself as a free 20-minute read for the day's news but aims to be hard-hitting. One article in today's paper says the city of Manchester didn't stick to its flood mitigation plan during last week's storms.

The paper will also run opinion columns and editorials, but Reese said the Daily Express would not stake out a particular political stance. The Express's news staff will include three main employees: two reporters and an editor, all of whom will write, Reese said.

Reese's own career began at the Thousandsticks News, a weekly in eastern Kentucky, and he has worked at several papers, including the Keene Sentinel.

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