Local daily to close.” Ultimately, that is the truth. From today, London’s Evening Standard is indeed ceasing to appear every weekday, as it has for almost 200 years. Yet you don’t have to have worked there for more than 15 years, as I did, to regard it as so much more than just a local rag.
It will live as a website, with a once a week print edition, the London Standard. But it’s certainly a moment. The reach of the Standard as we have known it was huge, if implicit. Though its print edition was largely restricted to the capital, it used to be referred to, without irony, as “the influential London Evening Standard”. How long ago that seems.
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The web indulges everyone. They don’t need to buy a paper and skip the pages they don’t like. If they don’t like grazing, they can go straight to the horoscope, or whatever. That atomisation may be a good thing but, just as we don’t all watch the same TV any more, it does mean we’re all getting further and further apart.
Whether you liked it or not, the Standard, like the church, the pub and the library, connoted community. The new weekly version will be a London version of the New Yorker. It has illustrious shoes to fill.
IIRC, it’s one of the papers bought by Lebedev, a Russian oligarch (and the son of a KGB officer stationed in London) and one of Boris Johnson’s backers. Presumably it has served its strategic purpose and is now a burnt asset.