The London Evening Standard is to cease daily print production and go weekly.
As anyone who has picked up a copy recently will have noticed the news is no surprise. It is very thin paper compared to earlier decades. The pandemic and working from home have clearly played a part, but so also has an obvious lack of advertising. Given in recent times the Standard has been free this was perhaps key in the decision.
I don’t propose a history of London papers but 50 years ago there was the right-wing Evening News and the rather more liberal Evening Standard, both paid for papers. The News closed and Robert Maxwell briefly launched the Daily News.
The Standard might be called a paper of the centre-right. That hardly reflects London but it does or perhaps more accurately did reflect the perspectives of the Home Counties commuters who were probably its main readership.
It was never great on London specific news except at the very top near national level. That gap in the past was filled by local papers but many of them have gone too.
Social media and the web now fill some of the space where print was. Issues abound around Editorial control and for historians preservation for posterity.
Letter writers will also mourn. The Standard publishes very few letters now but when it had a Letters Page Fletters were certainly written, despatched and printed…
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