Evening Standard To End Its Daily Newspaper

M@
By M@ Last edited 9 months ago

Last Updated 30 May 2024

Evening Standard To End Its Daily Newspaper
An evening standard distribution van in orange and white
Image: oxyman under creative commons licence

The Evening Standard is to go weekly.

It's no secret that the publication has been struggling. Most of us would have had a hunch just from how thin the free daily has become in recent times. But it has reportedly lost £84.5 million in the past six years, with its distribution plummeting from 600,000 before Covid to under 300,000 today. Clearly a crunch was coming.

That crunch is the end of daily print publishing, as first reported by the Guardian. Instead, the paper will focus on its online business with just a single weekly edition running through the printers, and the possible survival, in some form, of ES Magazine. It's not yet clear what effect this will have on jobs at the title.

The pandemic hit the Standard hard, and long-term. The subsequent rise in home-working brought a significant drop in its readership. The paper also cites wifi on the tube — soon to be enhanced by universal 4G/5G coverage — as a challenge. Many commuters have turned away from the free newspaper in favour of their own mobile screens. The paper has been loss-making for years, propped up by the riches of its owner Evgeny Lebedev.

A mock Evenign Standard board reading Blair I am the Resurrection
We'll miss the parodies. Image: Matt Brown

Founded as The Standard in 1827, the move brings almost 200 years of daily print publishing to a close. The Standard follows the direction of the Independent newspaper (also part-owned by Lebedev), which ceased its print publication entirely in 2016. Echoes also of Time Out magazine, which went from a much-loved weekly for which people paid, to a thinner freesheet, to online only in just a matter of years.

The decline of the Standard is a huge moment in London's media history. Daily print newspapers have been part of life here since the Daily Courant first published in 1702. With the Standard going weekly, we now have no daily London-centric newspaper other than City AM, which is only four days a week and with a narrower focus on financial matters. Metro, dished out for free on the tube and other outlets, is a national title.

The Standard's new-look weekly will launch later this year. Presumably even the name will have to change, lest "The Evening Standard," become more of a one-night stand.