How Will Media Change With The London Paper Gone?

It only seems like yesterday that News International was crowing over the sale of the Evening Standard to Alexander Lebedev for a pound, with wide-pupilled burbling in The London Paper: “We are optimistic and confident because we have you, Generation Free, a million urban Londoners, on our side”. But a few months on, News International is more interested in creating Generation Paid, and has chucked The London Paper onto the big adjacent tube seat in the sky.

Murdoch recently announced that The Sunday Times would start to have at least some sort of paid-for element to its online content, the first general interest newspaper to do so. This doesn’t really square with having a free newspaper that haemorrhages money, that was locked in a desperate revenue war with the London Lite, and which his son James and his new chief exec of News International, Rebekah Brooks, don’t have faith in. The funds can be used to prop up the even more loss-making (but obviously flagship) Times, while at least some of the staff from TLP will go to the Sunday Times and other corners of NI.

So how is this going to change the “media landscape”? Aside from the obvious environmental impact (428 less trees pulped per day, working with these figures), the freesheet dynamic is going to change. The two titles left are London Lite and Metro, both owned by DMGT – Metro’s pedigree, countrywide reach, and exclusive hold on public transport, makes it profitable; the Lite, despite its lean staff and content synergies with the Evening Standard, is not. The Lite might benefit from the loss in competition, but simply getting the right margins on advertising is going to be hard mid-recession – merging the Evening Standard and Lite in a free behemoth, as Joy Lo Dico suggests in the Independent, would surely be suicide. Why not cut the Lite to focus readers’ eyes towards the Metro, and consolidate its already strong position with advertisers; simultaneously this would divert other readers looking for a more quality product towards the Evening Standard.

Meanwhile, as TLP’s staffers pray for a sideways shift at NI, its editor, Stefano Hatfield, is in the running for the new Sun editorship. Brooks has a fortnight left in the role, and no successor has been announced yet – the Guardian mulls the options over this morning. Apparently Hatfield (possible cad and rubbish Twitterer) isn’t well-loved by Brooks, with the smart money going on Jesse Angelo, a NI success over at the New York Post.

Obviously the worst part of all this is that the best of the freesheets has gone. TLP trounced the Lite in all sorts of ways – its noughties design, its consciously anti-miserabilist stance, its acknowledgment of gays, ethnic minorities and the fact that on the tube you mostly want to read about celebrities rather than anything you need to concentrate on. Sandwiched between the frisky new Standard and the bland but pleasant Metro, the Lite is really going to have to start taking its vitamins if its wants to stick around.

Posted by Ben Beaumont-Thomas in Creative Economy | August 24, 2009 12:14PM |