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The media world is being tipped on its head. The market-leading London Evening Standard is becoming free, just at the time when internet media owners are looking to charge for something which has always been free.
News of the Evening Standard’s decision after 182 years of being sold on the streets of London highlights the plight of the country’s media and the radical decisions media owners are being forced to take to survive.
The move by the Evening Standard’s owners from it being a paid-for newspaper to a free circulation, increasing its print run from 250,000 to 600,000 is a major gamble.
The Evening Standard will now be pitched squarely against Associated Newspapers’ other title: London Lite. The London media market is an increasingly complex and highly competitive one for advertising share with four City-wide free papers: The Metro and City AM both distributed in the morning and the London Lite alongside the Standard from 12 October.
Pronouncements by the owners - Mr Lebedev and Associated Newspapers - suggest that they believe they’ll be able to maintain the quality of editorial by increasing the level of advertising. However, the owners have already seen the departure of news editor Hugh Dougherty to the Daily Mail after seven years, and advertising director, Simon Davies, has also jumped ship, joining the Independent and Independent on Sunday.
So with the internet taking over in terms of advertising market share from television, radio and print media, the media owners are increasingly focusing on whether they can start to charge for online content, and in particular news.
So will the likes of Rupert Murdoch succeed in his plans to get us all to pay for previously free internet news content? The results of a Harris Interactive poll suggest he faces an uphill struggle. The pollsters asked 1,188 people in the UK whether they would be prepared to pay for online news content. Not unexpectedly, 74 per cent said if their favourite news service started charging to access content online they would switch to a free alternative, with only five per cent saying they would remain loyal.
Rupert Murdoch’s News International, publisher of The Times and Sunday Times newspapers, may not yet have introduced online paid-for news in the UK, but it is always looking to counter dwindling advertising and circulation revenues. It has just launched the new online readers’ club Times+, which is based on Culture+, the arts and entertainments service. For a fee of £50 subscribers enjoy priority booking and discounted prices on a range of products.
So the $64,000 question is – will the Standard’s strategy work? Time will tell but what is certain is the only winners will be those media owners who are best able to secure their revenue streams and minimise their costs – a conundrum facing every business at the moment.
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