There's been a lot of, frankly, waffle written and spoken about the decision of the London Evening Standard to cease printing daily later on this year.
A recurring phrase appears to be: "It's remarkable a city the size of London can't sustain a daily local newspaper" or "It shows just how much trouble local journalism is in if London can't support a daily newspaper."
Journalism is too important for soundbites from people who like the sound of their own voice. They are the same people who make sweeping statements about what the Standard has got wrong over the years. Rarely do they say what they'd have done differently - and never in a way which explains why it would have led to another outcome.
The Standard, based on what I've read, will focus on being an online news brand. It already has a powerful website, which based on UKOM data reaches a good proportion of Londoners every month. Going (largely) digital only gives it the chance to be what it believes London needs.
The idea that a daily newspaper can meet the needs of an estimated 8.8m people via a single package distributed every day in an age when each of those 8.8m people can choose multiple information (note: not just news) sources which meet their interests, is crackers. The idea that a city of 8m not being able to support a daily newspaper only works if you've got your rose-tinted glasses on.
London will surely continue to have the Standard, as a trusted news source. So too it will have MyLondon, a brand Reach launched several years ago and edited by Deanne Blaylock. Launching in London is a balancing act - go too broad and you appeal to no-one, go too deep and you risk not appealing to enough people. Often, the traditional rules of building a product around location don't work as effectively as in other parts of the UK. Transient populations with multiple, individual touchpoints in the city (home, work, running club, friends) make it a complex challenge.
The team are doing a great job in providing the sort of news coverage readers of the Manchester Evening News and Liverpool Echo enjoyed online for years - breaking news, campaigning journalism and yes, fun stuff which too often we like to sneer at in journalism. We saw what we felt was a gap in the market and the 1.1m Londoners who read it every month seem to agree.
Then there are hyperlocal or borough-wide operators, some new entrants, some long-established. As well as new arrivals. I wish all success because we need more journalism, not less.
We also need to be sensible in our analysis - journalism is too important to be gated for those who can afford it, and there's more than enough advertising money out there to support journalism being free to air. The Government has a number of levers it can pull straight away to help people serious about local journalism.
To that end, the News Media Association's manifesto for media is a must-read for anyone who cares about the future of journalism:
https://lnkd.in/eRfyR82Z
