Another week, and another title joins the freesheet melee. But on closer inspection, it’s not another new title: it’s the London Evening Standard. It may be losing its 50p cover price but in the process new owner Alexander Lebedev will be more than doubling its circulation with 600,000 copies hitting the streets from this Monday.
A few short years ago it would have been hard to imagine the Evening Standard being handed out free. But the age of the freesheets has radically changed the publishing playing field. Mainstream titles are waging their own price wars in print and online, and looking for ever more radical ways to attract the fickle newspaper buyer – from wallcharts and CDs to winning Stonehenge (well a sunrise there, at least!). But for the freesheets it is a battle of volume; a battle that claimed thelondonpaper as its most recent casualty.
If freesheets are to generate the ad sales required to allow them to continue printing, then consistently appealing to a broad audience is essential. It will be interesting to see how the Evening Standard, which has always cultivated a relatively young, upmarket readership, balances the needs of the commercial department with the editorial integrity on which it has built its reputation.
Mike Ironside, chief executive of the National Readership Survey was at Eulogy! last week and asked us whether we felt our newspapers had a unique voice. Without a doubt, the room replied. It is clear that newspapers are still a national passion. Over the course of a week, three quarters of the UK population reads a newspaper, and half of us are still buying a Sunday paper.
If the Evening Standard can make the free model work, then it is going to put serious pressure on rival titles that are still hanging on to their cover price. But how long can the free model prosper? In this case, the power really is in readers’ hands. If we’re not willing to pick the freesheets up, then the advertisers will follow suit.
Like many others, I have found the evening journey rather empty since thelondonpaper departed and the Evening Standard, which has a distinctly different voice to London Lite and other freesheets, is undoubtedly a welcome addition for commuters and advertisers alike.
