Londoners drown in newsprint but are no better informed

A year ago the battle for the London newspaper reading public reached a molten temperature with the launch of two new freesheets, London Lite and the London Paper, which contributed little to the cause of grammar and spelling and a lot to the waste paper blowing round the capital's streets. Whilst precise readership figures for each paper remain obscure, there are about a million extra papers a day, and neither title looks like packing up its purple shoulder bag and going home. The launch of the London Paper was Rupert Murdoch's first foray into any market segment directly against the Evening Standard owner, Associated News and Media. The strategic aim was pretty clear - to push the Standard off the streets and Associated's response was to put out London Lite.
The Standard's sales have suffered - declining by about a quarter - but the battle for pavement space seems set to be lengthy. The view from the top deck of the No 19 bus is that both papers are editorially much of a muchness, with the London Paper edging it on attitude and bounce. But the aesthetics and editorial quality of either paper are secondary to the volume of distribution. There are two trends which the ongoing battle clearly illustrates: firstly that the trend for free content is only increasing and secondly that Londoners are no better informed about the daily life of the capital than they were a year ago.

One only has to look at growth rates for online display advertising - up 40% year on year as they have been for the past three years - to know the advertisers are not as fussy about who pays for content as they are about how engaging the audience finds it. The New York Times has recently dropped a pay wall on its website in front of its commentators, accepting that in a world over-supplied with opinion, you have to distribute your big-named columnists rather than lock them in an ivory tower. Similarly, Rupert Murdoch hinted that after his purchase of the Wall Street Journal, WSJ.com's pay wall might be relaxed.

But being free means there are constraints on investment in coverage. There are enough papers on London's streets now to build a papier mâché Buckingham Palace - a morning freesheet in the shape of Metro, two free evening papers and a paid-for evening paper. The capital is still not really being properly reported by any of them. TV and radio have struggled for years with the fact that London is such an amorphous sprawl that what happens in Battersea has little relevance to the citizens of Walthamstow, and the capital's newspapers are no different.

The hyperlocal revolution which will inevitably hit London cannot, it seems, come from mainstream media. There are some very good local papers in London, but these too have been subject to down-sizing - something which disappoints the truly local audience, which does not want listings for the next borough in the middle of its 10 pages of news.

The only viable way forward is for much smaller communities covering very narrow neighbourhoods - perhaps even as narrow as roads within boroughs - and managing this through the web. The problem here though will be the access to technology of the hyperlocal audiences. In five years' time the barriers to entry might have dropped so quickly that the very local audiences will have access both to read and to post news from their neighbourhoods, but for now it is still not enough of a mass market pursuit. And would these enterprises ever be supported by very local advertising, given the omniscience of Google in the local online search advertising market?

News International will keep pushing Associated, both through the London Paper and through The Times, which has the Daily Mail's audience in its cross hairs. But the bigger battle about how London is reported is as far from resolution as ever

Emily Bell
Monday September 3, 2007
The Guardian