Sad day as Evening Standard dies
NewsThe London Evening Standard is to stop printing five days a week and will aim to appear, possibly, just once a week.
When I arrived at the Standard as Assistant Editor in 2002, we put out five editions a day with three or four arts pages. Paid circulation was around 400,000 and a page of advertising cost £17,000. We were profitable, happy, news breaking and agenda setting.
Sic transit gloria mundi.
This is very sad news indeed. If a major world city like London sees its sole remaining daily evening paper reduced to a weekly afterthought, then what next? Tik-tok posts?
The time was when its coverage was excellent and some superb writers contributed to its pages. Brian Sewell’s weekly invectives were must-reads for any visual arts lover. Some of the music stuff was not bad, but not consistently on the same level.
Damn’ good golf writer, Renton Laidlaw, before he was lost to television.
Tik-tok, indeed. In the U.S., a significant fraction (perhaps a majority?) of millennials and GenZers get their news from, yes, Tik-tok, and mostly from unvetted sources.
‘Sad day’ what tosh. A right wing rag that has refused to move with the times, it deserves everything it’s got.
If you think it’s right wing you must be a Marxist. It is most definitely tending to the metropolitan elite Woke set these days.
Do you honestly think if it were centrist, or left wing, that it would survive? That’s very much open to doubt. Pretty much every evening paper in the US has died, or gone on-line, or switched to the morning. For that matter, many morning papers have died too.
I can understand your nostalgia, NL, but the biggest surprise to me (emigrated from UK in 2005) was that it was still going.
My fondest memory was the Bristow cartoon strip – a wonderful insight into life as a clerk.
Then you should have loved the 14- episode BBC Radio Sitcom (1999-2000) starring the late Michael Williams (Mr Judi Dench) as Bristow, based on the cartoon, and repeated on BBC Radio 4 Extra last year. I certainly did.
Sic transit gloria Monday only…
“five editions a day”
? as in one new print edition every 4.8 hours? or if it is during waking hours, one per 2.4 hours? how? why?
The “rolling news” of its day. The Final edition had the City prices, essential for bankers and investors alike to read on their commute home in the pre-Internet age.
Long gone are the days when the newspaper sellers would call out “Star, News and Standard” the three London evening papers. Now they cannot literally give away the one remaining title. Everything is of its time but the Standard was an important supporter of theatre, opera and ballet in the Capital for many decades.
the papers were so much a part of London that Pinter wrote a brilliant sketch LAST TO GO about a newspaper seller who did not know which would go last.
Long gone indeed. From my memory though they usually shouted out “Stuhnewsonstannet!”
No great loss really in this part of the 21st century. No different to those who get nostalgic about “proper” cars like the Morris Minor that you could dismantle at the roadside and rebuild in less than an hour. Part of an interesting but now useless past.
“Eevenin’ Stanner!” always my ‘go to’ paper for long train journeys back to the NE after London meetings and especially liked the “last edition” of the day as most up-to-date, before rolling on-line news was available. Always loved the crosswords and puzzles, especially the Cryptic Crossword, but could never do the Kids’ Crossword – different wavelength. Was surprised when the print version went “free”. I’d been happy to purchase previously.
It is sad, I already miss the Star, The Evening News, and The London Daily News.
So sad 🙁 That was such a large part of living in London. And what about Metro? Is it gone already?
Metro lives on – for the moment…
…but there is another consideration worth thinking about. Just an idea.
All these freebie newspapers get read and then dumped all over the place, giving rise to a daily colossal mountain of rubbish because their being free makes people less likely to take them home and then dispose of them in the recycling bin. Clearing them up each day from streets, buses and trains comes at a cost. They cannot easily be recycled, as they are often accompanied by discarded pizza crusts, Macdonalds packages, vape sticks, fag packets and other more unpleasant debris.
These days, we can read the very latest news on mobile phones as we travel home and when we get there we can binge on news solidly from a wealth of radio and TV channels. I will certainly miss the Evening Standard, as will many others, but is this just one case where more modern media are preferable, for ecological reasons?
The world is short of the elements to required make the digital media and there is built-in obsolescence. The mining of such minerals creates a lot of pollution, and deforestation, and some of the mines are in the hands of less desirable regimes. Mounds of electronic media are not recycled and go to landfill. Not ecological. I don’t have a smartphone and it’s hell trying to read things on small screens anyway.
I’m going to stick my neck out and say maybe they could print less piles of Eevnin Stannerds but mobile phones are an anti social blight on society, both isolating and polluting (think of this globally ..where are millions and billions of obsolete outdated mobiles and their defunct chargers and batteries going to end up? I think we all know the answer to that. I will miss that old freebie of an evening commute.
As someone who hasn’t bought CDs for many years, except very rarely at opportunity shops, it has just occurred to me that I haven’t bought a hard copy newspaper for many years either. Could not “The Standard” continue online, updating as new stories come to hand?
Meanwhile Melbourne’s “The Herald”, formerly essential reading on the train home and famed for its photos of little girls with kittens on the home page vanished as an evening paper years ago.