Categories: uncategorized
Tags: politics
Date: 15 September 2006 12:27:18
Walking to Euston the other day (to get the Northern line to the Cathedral for the Reader's course) I bumped into a full-scale war. Blood on the streets. Well, ink.
I haven't been paying much attention to the papers for the last few weeks. Partly because I spend half my life on the Net, partly because I mainline on Radio Four at home, partly because I've been reading the book Press Gang by Roy Greenslade, which is a history of British newspapers since the War. (well, English newspapers to be honest - he skimps on the Scottish press, which is just as bad).
Anyway, between UCL and Euston at least three people tried to give me a copy of a new freebie paper called London Lite and another two tried to give me another one called The London Paper. Yesterday and today, for the first time in years, I saw no copies of the Metro on the train in the morning
Even if I hadn't been reading the Greenslade book (which is bloody brilliant, especially the first part) I'd have recognised what was going on. A fullscale circulation war, as newspapers attempt to persuade advertisers that more people read them than the other one. The British press has a long tradition of this, and News International (AKA Murdoch & the Poodles) and Associated (the Daily Mail and its clones) are the worst offenders. Whenever someone launches a new paper, someone else launches a spoiler (or relaunches their own paper, or invents a totally imaginary paper that they never intend to print (Murdoch once went as far as appointing an editor, hiring journalists, and fitting our office space for a fake paper) or in the case of the old Evening News exhumes its stinking corpse from the grave. Bingo and tits.
As far as I could tell from the one copy of London Lite I looked at on a train a few days ago, its basically the pictures and celebrity interviews from the EveningStandard with the news articles in between taken away. The London Paper looks even skimpier. They both have a vaguely similar purplish look to their front pages.
I've no real idea which (if either) of them is the "real" paper and which the spoiler. Perhaps they both are. The obvious target is Murdoch trying to knock out the Standard but the paper that's vanished from the streets is the Metro. Maybe they are using the same printers or distributors for it. They've been recycling copy between the Metro, Standard, and Mail for years, so adding another one probably doesn't stretch their intellects too much.
But it certainly isn't stretching their readers intellects. From what little I've seen there is almost nothing in either new paper to make them worth picking up off the floor, which is where most of them ended up at Euston last night. But that's the British tabloid press for you. Like Roy Thomson said decades ago, the news is the stuff that keeps the adverts apart. Of course he was Canadian. Like most British Press Barons. In Canada they couldn't get away with what they get away with over here.