Armistice Day Of The Freesheet War: London Lite Folds

It’s the least surprising media news this month, but the London Lite, the freesheet that has clogged many a tube aisle over the last few years, is being wound up.

At the same time as the paper’s launch, News International came up with their own free title, The London Paper, and it became quickly clear that this town wasn’t big enough for the both of them, especially not with the Metro already distributed on the tube and in buses. According to a former team leader and BI acquaintance, those handing out the papers were apparently given rousing, NFL-esque team talks to hype them up and get them to more forcefully press them into the hands of passersby; to continue the metaphor, you needed the dexterity of a running-back to evade these determined paper-hawkers. Popular areas such as the streets outside major stations witnessed the kind of territoriality usually associated with protective mother bears as vendors tried to get the prime commuter-coshing spot. There are also apocryphal stories of each paper phoning up the others’ printer, and paying them to stop printing it for a couple of hours, so that they could hit the streets first.

This ever more demented competition was borne out of the fact that the two papers were sending each other’s advertising premiums down, and as they were the sole source of income, both quickly started heading into unprofitability. At least it made a crazed kind of market sense to stay in the game when each was owned by a completely different company – but now the London Paper has folded and the Evening Standard has become free, the London Lite is essentially competing with itself. The Evening Standard is still partly owned by DMGT, which owns the Lite – there’s no point creating an advertising war when you could be keeping premiums high with one good-quality free newspaper.

And so ends a weird time for the capital’s media, where gigantic hubris rubbed up against abject failure, subterfuge against abuse. Hopefully now the Evening Standard, unencumbered by such destructive market pressures, can start to provide a really quality read for the way home – though Lebedev’s utopian cancelling of the cover price still might not end up sitting well with a depressed advertising market…

Posted by Ben Beaumont-Thomas in Creative Economy | October 28, 2009 11:58AM |