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the Bay Area, free daily newspapers are providing an essential service, covering local stories ignored by the dominant dailies.

But a review of local stories in the three most prominent free tabloids suggests the quality of reporting falls well short of the journalism provided by newspapers you purchase. The giveaway dailies often push inexperienced, underpaid reporters to churn out short articles that lack context, adequate sources and initiative.

The people who run those papers -- the Palo Alto Daily News chain, the San Francisco Examiner and the San Mateo Daily Journal -- acknowledge that what they are doing isn't likely to win them any Pulitzer Prizes. They are publishing, as the Examiner's former Chairman Robert Starzel noted this spring, a different kind of paper -- a 20-minute "quick read." Or as Will Harper, an occasional media critic at the free weekly East Bay Express put it, "not especially good coverage but ... a meaningful contestant for my 30 minutes of burrito-eating time."

That might not matter if these mini-dailies remained a marginal phenomenon. But today free papers are growing faster in the Bay Area and the rest of the country than any other kind of newspaper. Journalists see them as harbingers of changes in the craft, with wide-reaching implications for the quality of information available to the public.

The people these papers quote most frequently split in their opinion of whether local citizens are better or worse off with the free tabloids. Politicians are generally pleased that the volume of local coverage available to residents has expanded, affording them a powerful new way to communicate with their constituents.

"I frankly think that the more the better," said Rich Gordon, president of the San Mateo County Board of Supervisors, who has seen three free papers converge on his territory. "It gives folks a greater opportunity to find out things going on in the community."

But Mr. Gordon and others have found in-depth reporting lacking, partly due to time and space constraints and the papers' inability to keep many reporters on local beats for more than six months before they move on to better paid jobs. "Details getting behind a story or an issue, probing kinds of things -- I don't think that's their forte."

Duane Bay, a former mayor of East Palo Alto, was less charitable. He said staffing at the Palo Alto Daily News in particular was so lean and the editing so slanted against government -- in his view to manufacture mini-scandals to push more papers off the news racks -- that residents would on balance be better off without it.

Case study: San Mateo County

San Mateo County is a good place to examine how much the free dailies are contributing to the local civic life. Since 2000, the three new newspapers have intersected there, promising readers something for nothing -- fresh updates on planning commission meetings, local arts events, auto accidents, cops reports and land transactions. With a total of six dailies vying for readers and advertisers in this largely suburban county of 700,000 residents, an area once almost ignored is now flush with press competition.

A quick analysis of newspaper coverage in the county by Grade the News affirms that the papers focus on serious local concerns more consistently than all but one of the paid papers. But the free papers fill these gaps at a price. Looking at a snapshot of their output -- four days during the last week in