Express is here, but is there any there there?

It was a long, rainy Monday morning for Eric La Prince. The 14-year-old Washington, D.C., resident was one of a legion of yellow-vest-clad people enlisted to help the Washington Post fight off a competitor which hasn't even gotten to town yet.

Eric LaPrince, 14, is one of dozens of youngsters The Post is enlisting to hand out copies of its new free daily. (Photo by Chad Capellman)

His 6 a.m. - 10 a.m. workday started when he woke up at 4:30 a.m.

"Starbucks is like my favorite place in the world," La Prince said. "I can't get enough of it."

The Post, meantime, hopes many of the passengers at stops such as this can't get enough of the wire briefs, advertising and random quotes that comprise the Express.

The goal: make the free paper - which comes out Monday through Friday - a habit among younger people who are less and less frequently reading a daily newspaper. That's not, however, who La Prince was handing off most of his papers to.

"The majority of the people I would have to say were business people," he said. "Not many of the people were picking it up. I found when I came up with my own catchy slogans, it started to pick up."

While La Prince's day had a bit of an ebb and flow to it, he did have someone there to keep him company. Sort of.

Brooke Linville, an intern with the free alt-weekly Washington City Paper, was handing out a paper that at first glance appeared to be a serious competitor. Then she opened her mouth.

In addition to the debut of Express, some commuters were treated to a tongue-in-cheek "tribute" to the new paper in town.

What they received was a tabloid finger in the eye of The Post, going by the name "Expresso," that took an Onion-style approach to lampooning the Post's effort to crowd the free-paper market.

Linville said it took her a little less than two hours to hand out 200 of the "daily newsweekly" papers with such tongue-in-cheek features as "What Are You Not Reading"; a list of "Names in the News" that was simply, well, names in the news, such as J. Lo, Ben, Jay-Z, Jewel, Beyonce, etc.; a "sports" section with scores from two video games; three comic strips with no words; and numerous attributions to "wire reports."

The City Paper's Monday mockery was perhaps foreshadowed in a July piece about a young, non-reading Metro rider - the target audience for Express.

"It's tailored to those who don't read which is, I think, the audience the Post is trying to get," Linville said. "It was really funny because the people who [the Express] was geared towards still weren't grabbing the paper. So it was still the older people who had the Washington Post in their hands, were reading it as well."

However, not everyone who was reading the Express fell into the "already converted " category.

Erin, a student at Virginia Tech's Northern Virginia campus in Merrifield, said she rarely bought a paper to read during her commute. During the 50-minute Metro ride, she said she would usually just scan the headlines over the shoulders of other passengers on the train.

Monday, however, she found herself reading the majority of the new Express.

While the paper makes few references to its parent publication, Erin said some of the columnists' names rang a bell. In particular, she noted careers columnist Mary Ellen Slater, who is one of several columnists to provide the only Post-produced content in the paper via excerpts from online chats.

"It's better quality than the City Paper in terms of the news," she said. "But for the most part I wouldn't associate it directly with the Post. "

Tatiana Racheva, a junior computer science major from Russia who attends the University of Maryland, said she picked up the paper on the train and started reading the entertainment section on page 13. She then found herself reading each story back towards the beginning of the paper.

"I pretty much read everything, even things I didn't care about, " Racheva said. "But at the same time, I can't say it's giving a lot of information about anything at all. It reminds me of some of the magazines I would read in Russia. It has very, very short articles. "

Todd Peterson, a 28-year-old graduate student at Johns Hopkins University, likened Express to television news.

"I love the fact that Fox News is trying to get people who don't really follow the news, " he said. "I think maybe the Post is trying to do that. "

During the ride from a Northern Virginia suburb to the downtown D.C. Hopkins campus, Peterson marveled at the story of boxer Mike Tyson squandering $300 million.

He also noted an interest in the paper's use of random quotes called "Hearsay," though Peterson lamented the fact there wasn't more to the story than a reference to where each quote was taken from.

Such is life with a newspaper that tries to offer up as many snippets as it can to people who read it within the time frame of a TiVo-condensed sitcom.

Said Peterson: "I guess it's really meant to read on the Metro and then be tossed in the first trash can you see. "