London Evening Standard to go Free

[Barrichello]

After "The London Paper" going down the pan, looks like the London Lite could be next...........

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/to...cle6858274.ece

The 182 year old Evening Standard has in recent years bounced around from 10 to 25 to 50p and now gone completely free as of next week.

Going free and doubling their distribution i reckon they are hoping to increase their advertising revenue. I know this topic is rather "London centric" to people who live or work travel out of here, but wonder if it has ramifications for the rest of the printed press around the country?

[pp05]

That is good news.

Anything has to be better than London Lite / or the other one.

[whoareyou]

That is good news.

Anything has to be better than London Lite / or the other one.

The other one is the metro, London Lite is dead now, they were loosing too much money. I recon the metro will get taken over by the evening standard.

[pp05]

The other one is the metro, London Lite is dead now, they were loosing too much money. I recon the metro will get taken over by the evening standard.

Metro is in the morning isn't it?

Afternoon two were London Lite and London paper or something. Both equally abysmal.

[TheAnimus]

Its odd, the metro is quite good at been non-partisan on the whole.

The london paper was classic murdock, popularist, with a hit of what ever the offical news corp says should win the next election.

The way they gave red Ken the Kunt a monthly column to slag off boris, half of the things where actually Ken's fault..... Painfully obviously so as he'd only been in office a week......

So the London paper was absolutely no loss to the population, and a loss to news corp, well couldn't happen to a nicer company could it!

The lite and the standard are probably going to end up merging? It dosen't make sense to compete in this space at the moment because advertising revenues are so low.

[BEANFro Elite]

The way I understood it, they were meant as something to get you by on your journey, were'nt meant to compete with real newspapers.

They're ideal for your fourty to one-hour journeys as there isn't that much content in them, I personally liked the london paper and the lite.

[Barrichello]

The way I understood it, they were meant as something to get you by on your journey, were'nt meant to compete with real newspapers.

They're ideal for your fourty to one-hour journeys as there isn't that much content in them, I personally liked the london paper and the lite.

Indeed. The full evening standard i could see was always favoured by the those commuting out of London, for those long journeys home. Personally takes me about 15mins to get home from the city, on the rare occasion i have read the full Evening standard, lucky to have time to read the business/sports section before getting of the train - the free ones took me about the right time to read the bits worth reading (not allot)

[Mike Fishcake]

The Manchester Evening News runs along similar lines. The "city edition" is free, but the others you have to pay for.

As far as I can tell, the only difference between the regular edition and the city edition is the price

Not sure quite where the boundaries are, but it goes out to at least the main university campuses. (just over a mile from the city centre)