What now for the London Lite?
Our columnist Raymond Snoddy wonders what’s next for the London Lite after the closure of rival freesheet thelondonpaper.
More than 20 years ago the old Viscount Rothermere could barely stop himself wheezing with delight at the memory of how he helped to see off Robert Maxwell’s Daily News by dis-interring the long dead London Evening News. After it had fulfilled its role as a successful spoiler the paper was swiftly, and unsentimentally, dispatched once more.
The present Viscount, the chairman of the Daily Mail and General Trust, is much too young to wheeze but there will be a grin on his face for weeks to come. The young Viscount has proved himself capable of living up to family tradition. His spoiler, London Lite, has prevailed over its deadly rival thelondonpaper and Murdoch, for goodness sake, is a far more formidable, and rational opponent than Maxwell ever was.
So three cheers all round and, once the dust has settled, London Lite can receive a decent funeral, it’s job done? After all, so much has changed in the three years since the paper launched. Part of the rationale for London Lite was to protect the right flank of the Evening Standard and stop Murdoch trying to dominate London’s classified advertising market. But a majority stake in the Standard has been decently off-loaded to Alexander Lebedev as if it were a struggling Premiership football team and the Russian oligarch has even been persuaded to place £25 million in escrow to pay for redundancies if the paper ever closes.
Is there any need for London Lite? After all the recession is always a handy excuse for closing things down – if any excuse were needed given the hostile market sentiment towards loss-making newspapers.
The Viscount Rothermere could instantly add a decent few pence to his share price by closing London Lite whenever any news supply deal with the Evening Standard runs out.
Although closure looks like a no-brainer there may be more life in London Lite than its current theoretically parlous position might suggest.
The Rothermere’s have total voting control of DMGT even though the company is quoted. They can therefore afford to take the longer view.
What is certainly true about the imminent closure of thelondonpaper is that the event is of far greater significance to the newspaper industry than the mere reduction of litter in one city. In many ways it goes to the heart of some of the current debates about the future of newspapers and how they might be funded in future.
It is a symbol of the final end of vanity amongst newspaper proprietors. Rothermere V Murdoch: and hurrah Murdoch blinks first. They simply can’t afford such little personal luxuries any more. The decision to close thelondonpaper was a business decision almost certainly initiated by the un-proprietorial James Murdoch. The only remaining mystery is how the original business plan passed muster. A staff of 60, including 40 journalists, in what was virtually a stand-alone operation, would always have struggled without the worst recession since the Second World War.
The real significance is what the closure says about the debate between free and paid for content within Murdoch’s News Corporation and elsewhere.
The great News Corp tanker has most decidedly turned, minds concentrated by the recent announcement of a £2 billion annual loss, although much of this comes from the reduction of the company’s assets in the books.
The slogan has changed – like something out of Orwell’s Animal Farm. Now it’s: “Free Bad. Paid-For Good.”
The trouble is there are fashions in ideas about newspaper financing – as with everything else. It would certainly be easy to lose faith in fickle advertising, given the ever-growing internet threat to classified. It might however be wise to pause just a moment.
No-one can doubt that charging for expensively assembled content is a pretty attractive idea. But what if it just doesn’t work outside of specialist information of the sort that the Financial Times or Wall Street Journal provides?
The biggest publisher of “free” information in the UK, which can call on the work of around 2,000 journalists – the BBC – isn’t going to start charging for its website within the UK because we’ve all paid already.
Many publishers will be cheering Rupert Murdoch on in his efforts to find a more solid method of funding newspapers going forward into a different era. But not even the Murdochs, young or old, can walk on water. If the punters refuse to pay, or the vast majority of them do, then you could find yourself without any realistic strategy.
One size may not fit all and it may be rather better, if a little messy, to hedge a few bets particularly for family-controlled media groups.
Viscount Rothermere has now been gifted the opportunity to be flexible and keep London Lite going to see if it adds up to a business.
There must certainly be a better business for one free evening newspaper in London than two. The consumer demand is obviously there, as anyone who uses the London Underground will testify.
The advertising may, or may not be there. Now is not the obvious time to decide.
Viscount Rothermere will probably play it long, as his father did before him, and give the newly minted London Lite “monopoly” a chance to prove itself. And he doesn’t have to worry too much about what effect it will have on the fate of the Evening Standard.
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