Has London’s struggling Standard newspaper hit upon a groundbreaking new idea to stem its eye-watering annual losses – actually charging people to buy a paper? The Standard went free in 2009, adopting an advertising-based model and being handed out at the capital’s Tube stations. That model was hit hard, though, by the rise of working-from home and the installation of 5G coverage on the network which allowed the remaining commuters to fiddle with their phones instead.
Last year, owner Evgeny Lebedev ended 165 years of history when he closed the paper’s daily evening edition and replaced it with a single weekly one. In May this year it reported a pre-tax loss of a whopping £19.6m in the year up to last September, taking the total sum lost over the past eight years to almost £125m.
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Now, with no fanfare or official announcement, the paper appears to be edging towards charging for its product once again. In November last year,
Better Retailing revealed the Standard was to be sold for £2 in newsagents outside of central London in a trial lasting six weeks, in independent shops and a small number of Co-ops in such places as Croydon and Hemel Hempstead.
Rats in a Sack has learned that the trial is to continue and has been extended to stores such as Tesco in areas as central as Zone 2. Why anyone would want to pay £2 in Hackney when they can pick one up for free a few miles away is unclear.
