Is someone trying to murder the 'Evening Standard' from within?

The poor old 'Standard' is suffering as never before. With Associated now offering two rivals to its own product, former editor Simon Jenkins asks if there is a future for a paid-for newspaper in London

When Sherlock Holmes needed to put an advertisement in a London evening paper, he could not decide which. He told his assistant (in "The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle") to try "the Globe, Star, Pall Mall, St James's, Evening News, Standard, Echo and any others that occur to you". At that time (1892) the list ran to 14.

London now has one evening newspaper left - or has it? For the past two months, the monopoly supplier of London evening news, Associated Newspapers, has seemed to lose its corporate head. Its Evening Standard (price 40p) has for nearly five years been battered by a rival, Metro, also owned by Associated and distributed free on the Tube.

Then in December a second free paper arrived, also from Associated. Called Standard Lite, it is produced by the Standard's own staff and given away free from central London newsstands at lunchtime, alongside the early paid-for edition of the Standard itself. Readers are offered news and gossip for nothing or that plus features, columns and arts for 40p.

The Lite's 50,000 copies disappear instantly. The impact on the sale of the Standard proper is as yet a secret, but since its circulation has already fallen almost 10 per cent in a year, it can hardly be benign. What is happening? Will the old Evening Standard, as pessimists declare, be gone by the year's end? Is someone trying to murder a great London institution, someone from within? A case for Sherlock Holmes indeed.

Most British papers are enduring their most troubled times since the late 1980s and the demise of the print unions. The Telegraph titles are threatened with a strike by journalists. They face a cut of 90 of their staff from their new owners, the Barclay brothers. The Independent journalists are also balloting on strike action. Staff cuts were recently made at the Mirror and Times. The Financial Times's British edition has lost 8.7 per cent of its sales over a year, and is frantically struggling to reposition itself, possibly abandoning its British character altogether in favour of "the world". Even the BBC is demanding 15 per cent cuts in staffing. Conventional journalism is sorely threatened. Is the Evening Standard to be the first sacrifice on the great altar so clearly marked: internet?

My attitude to the Standard is a mix of addiction and nostalgia. I joined the paper when little more than a boy. I watched it move from hot metal to paste-up to computerisation. I wrote for it, edited it and fought to save it from closure in 1978. I have written more words for it than I could count, and still have a column nestling comfortably by the ever more promiscuous bosom of Londoner's Diary. The looking-glass which the Standard holds up to London may often seem distorted, chipped and smudged, but it still reflects the capital's moods with affectionate familiarity. The mix of national and metropolitan news, showbusiness gossip and highbrow arts coverage pioneered by Charles Wintour in the 1960s and 1970s has been sustained ever since.

So what is going on? The Standard's troubles began when it became a monopoly in 1980. No monopoly paper can satisfy every point on the spectrum. When Beaverbrook's old Standard was spliced with Harmsworth's old Evening News, the pill was sweetened by the single title remaining the Standard. But a competitive edge was lost. Journalists no longer measured their work against a rival. Their enemy became a solitary and remorseless one, the circulation figure. It has beaten them at every turn.

In 1960, Londoners bought 2.2m copies of three evening papers, the News, Star and Standard. Each closure cost readers. The 1980 merger lost 150,000 sales, leaving the new Standard with just over 600,000. The slide continued. Last year the figure fell below 400,000 paid-for sales. December's audited figure was 348,000, down 10 per cent on the year before. Associated had to do something.

Evening papers are everywhere under pressure. Of Britain's 80 titles, only seven last year saw a rise in sales. The reasons are legion. Fewer people are commuting by public transport. Suburban outlets no longer deliver papers to doorsteps. Children will not do paper rounds after school. More people are in cars listening to radio news. Such traditional evening paper pabulum as horse and greyhound racing cards, closing prices and "what's on" are in retreat or served by rival media. And distribution in London is hell. Each street vendor who gives up his pitch loses another clutch of passing sales.

Yet pundits know never to underestimate Associated Newspapers. The last time the London evening market surged was in 1987, when Associated's Vere Harmsworth decided to relaunch his old Evening News alongside the Standard to fight off Robert Maxwell's ambitious London Daily News. Associated produced 40,000 copies of the defunct title and London suddenly had three papers again. This state of bliss lasted just five months before the Daily News - and then the Evening News - closed down. A lesson was learnt, that Londoners will read more papers if given a spread of choice. Otherwise, monopoly squeezes itself.

Hence the decision of Associated five years ago to spread its wings with Metro. The paper is placed in Tube stations through an exclusive contract with Transport for London. The intention is to mop up the most casual of readers, those with minutes to spare between stations. Now 495,000 Metros are distributed each day. This tidy monopoly continues to madden the London mayor, Ken Livingstone, who has a paranoid aversion to the Associated Group. But the deal pre-dated his control of the Tube. The money was good and no rival was in sight.

Now there are rumblings that the Express proprietor, Richard Desmond, may have the answer to Livingstone's prayer. A new tabloid freesheet could steal Metro's Tube contract and endanger Associated's monopoly. With the Standard losing money, free papers are now crucial to the group's hold on this market. Accordingly, Associated decided last year to seek another group of marginal readers: London women spending a solitary hour over lunch. Standard Lite's 50,000 copies are given away between 11.30am and 2.30pm only in central London. Since vendors must be paid to do this, and compensated for the loss of paid-for sales, the cost must be exorbitant. But Associated is now circulating more evening papers - some 900,000 - than London has seen since 1978.

The obvious question now is whether the group can recoup the plummeting revenue from sales by increasing revenue from freesheet advertising. This is not inconceivable. Ever since the Wapping revolution, newspapers have seen the balance of their revenue shift from sales to advertising. This is partly the outcome of the 1990s price wars, when the benefit of falling costs was gratifyingly redistributed from publishers to readers. Newspapers today are barely half the price they were 15 years ago. The shift also reflects the fall in sales of tabloids and the rise of the qualities. The former rely more heavily on cover price revenue, the latter on advertising.

Associated has certainly taken a gamble on London. But it is not alone. There is a shift, admittedly often a desperate one, from paid-for to free evening papers worldwide. Both Chicago's evening papers are now free. These are times for cool heads. But the marginal increase in choice has had at least one gain. The content of the "proper" Standard has gone markedly upmarket since the arrival of the Lite.

I take comfort from the fact that more people appear to be reading a London evening newspaper than for 25 years. I take comfort from the fact that the Standard itself, for all its apparent drift downmarket, carries at least four times more copy, and more and longer articles than when I first joined it. I take comfort from the fact that every few years an entrepreneur takes down the dusty file marked, "a new London paper," and sends it round to his banker. London is a big, rich and sophisticated city, where millions are daily on the move. What they want I am sure they will get.

This is a shortened version of an article that first appeared in the March issue of 'Prospect' - www.prospect-magazine.co.uk

DIARY

Gossip Central

Mutiny is in the air at the Daily Mail following the proposal of managing editor Charles Garside to merge Ephraim Hardcastle, Wicked Whispers and the Richard Kay page into a single "gossip desk". He is also threatening to sack any Mail scribes who dare to sell titbits to other Fleet Street diaries. "As soon as all this came up, people were on the phone to friends on other papers, spreading the news," reports one Mail insider.

Don't mention the war

One story which, of course, we didn't read in the Mail last week concerned the Nazi connections of its late owner Lord Rothermere - or as an intro in the rival Daily Express gleefully put it: "The Nazi-loving owner of the Daily Mail newspaper paid a glamorous spy to act as his go-between with Hitler". Instead, we were delighted to read in the paper what a nice time the wife of the present Lord Rothermere had when she previewed the Daily Mail Ideal Home Show.

A Rod to beat his own...

Meanwhile, we note that the photograph of the ubiquitous Rod Liddle in the bath that accompanies his GQ piece about the joys of masturbation shows him holding a glass of wine in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Clever chap, old Rod, but exactly, how under these circumstances, does he do it?

Dead or alive?

Wednesday's Guardian featured an obituary of Henry Grunwald, one-time editor of Time magazine. Three pages away, it ran an op-ed piece by Henry Grunwald, president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews. Spooky ...

Morris's revenge

Not a great week for Michael Grade, now that he stands to lose the BBC governors of which he's chairman. His mood will hardly improve if he watches tonight's X-Rated - The TV They Tried to Ban on Channel 4. The programme recounts what happened when Grade was the Channel 4 boss and pulled one of the episodes of Chris Morris's notorious Brass Eye series. Morris got his own back when, in another episode, an obscene message about Grade flashed up on the screen. Too fleeting to be discernible the first time round, it is tonight given the full slo-mo treatment.

Under the weather

The Evening Standard got itself in a meteorological muddle last week when its Thursday late edition splashed on the dire warnings of the weather Londoners would face the next day: "rush-hour snow, black ice, freezing rain and temperatures of minus 10C". But the weather forecast on page two told a rather different story, predicting temperatures of between minus 3C and minus 6C. Then, when Friday came, the best the paper could offer was that temperatures had hit minus 2C. The good news was that nobody had to turn up to work at the Standard on Friday since the paper itself had urged bosses to let staff work from home. Amazing the paper got out at all.