The Evening Standard: too lite, too late
What's the London newspaper industry gonna do? Faced with a declining readership, it's shrinking its product from broadsheet (The Independent, The Times) to tabloid (The Independent, The Times), or "compact", as the newly downsized prefer to put it, but what do you do if you can't get smaller? Simple. You give the paper away.
That's what London's Evening Standard started doing on Tuesday. Standard Lite is a new, free edition of the paper that's handed out between 11.30 am and 2.30 pm. The non-lite version of the paper sells on news-stands at the same time for 40p. The paper's paid circulation now is at 371,000 and dropping rapidly.
So what's the difference between the two papers? Well, the give-away Standard Lite is a celeb-filled, gossip-filled paper and the paid-for Evening Standard is a celeb-filled, gossip-filled... Seriously though, the give-away version represents the ailing Standard's last attempt to find a reason to exist. The plan is the get more ads and then charge more for them in the paid version by offering advertisers the inducement of running the same ads for free in the lite edition. If the trick works, the paper could then raise its ad rates next year and watch the dosh flow in.
The big problem with this scheme, though, is that the Evening Standard is doomed. It's natural consumers work in the service-sector now and most of them have access to the net. They don't need an evening paper anymore to tell them what's going on in the world. They're getting the minute-by-minute accounts on their desktops. And when they get on their trains and buses, they whip out the mobile phone or the MP3 player and immerse themselves in a world of entertainment that they're in charge of, not some editor down in Docklands.
Metro, the free paper that's distributed in the London Underground at dawn has eaten the Evening Standard's breakfast and lunch and it's very hard to fight free, especially if you have a paid-for version of the same product on the same shelf. Pity. As someone who loves newspapers, I hate to see one die but the city evening edition is an anomaly now. The battle for survival among the dailies can be expected to heat up in 2005. It will be over in 2010.
