This story was on the BBC website just now. Apparently, the publishers of the London Evening Standard have announced it is to become a free paper, with approx. 600,000 copies to be given out in London.
This follows the recent closure of the London Paper, News International’s London free sheet.
No details on the Standard website at the moment.
Quite often they dish them out free in the evenings anyway, at least in Central London, at main train stations, tube stations etc. I assume thats to keep up the circulation/readership figures, to keep the advertisers happy.
Will be interesting to see if this leads to any further new papers being launched or if too many hands have already been burnt in this market, especially with the low levels of advertising about at the moment (except for all those poxy ‘sell your gold’ adverts on tv!)
It is not such a great surprise.
For most publishers, newsstand sales are a very small part of their revenue. We had a great discussion about this earlier in the week at our Future of Publishing Discussion Dinner. Thought you might be interested in some of the thoughts of other publishers. http://thebln.com/2009/10/why-free-is-no-big-deal-for-the-evening-standard/