Chinese Company Sniffing Around The London Paper

Barely a month after its closure was announced, daily freesheet The London Paper shuffles off to clutter the Tube carriages of heaven (or perhaps hell) this week — Friday's edition will be the last. But could it live on under new owners? A Chinese firm has approached News International offering to take the loss-making title off its hands. Shanghai-based Bros Magazine (no connection to the Eighties popsters, more's the pity) wants to transform TLP into a weekly paper, with a distribution run of 200,000, featuring sections in Japanese and Chinese alongside English to tap into the capital's polyglot population. The publisher already runs similar titles in Asia. Despite that, News International have rejected the proposal, calling it a "weak" product idea; given that Rupert Murdoch's current wife, Wendi Deng, is Chinese, perhaps they're just kicking themselves for not thinking of it first.