London Lite
Overview
London Lite was a free daily newspaper published in London by Associated Newspapers, part of the Daily Mail and General Trust. It was available from Monday to Friday, in the afternoons and evenings, from street distributors in central London only. It began on 14 December 2004 as Standard Lite, a freesheet edition of the Evening Standard, and was relaunched under the London Lite name in August 2006, at the height of the capital's freesheet battle with News International's thelondonpaper. Its last edition was published on Friday 13 November 2009, a date chosen by its staff for its swan song.
At its peak the paper distributed around 400,000 copies a day, claimed a million daily readers at its closure, and for three years was one of the defining sights of the London commute: vendors on street corners, commuters reading on the Underground, and discarded copies gathering wherever the evening crowds dispersed. Its rise and fall, compressed into five years, came to symbolise the brief era in which London's evening newspaper market was contested by three titles at once.
Origins as Standard Lite
On 14 December 2004 Associated Newspapers launched a freesheet edition of the Evening Standard titled Standard Lite, intended to help boost the group's London circulation by offering a free, shorter version of the paid-for evening paper. Standard Lite had 48 pages, compared with about 80 in the main paper, which also carried a supplement on most days. It was initially available only between 11.30 a.m. and 2.30 p.m., from Evening Standard vendors in the central area — a lunchtime and early-afternoon product designed to sample the Standard's journalism to readers who did not buy it.
The lite format tested the proposition that a free, condensed evening paper could find its own audience and its own advertisers without destroying the parent title. For twenty months Standard Lite operated in that supporting role. Its transformation in 2006 came not from its own performance but from a competitive threat: News International, Rupert Murdoch's company, announced its own free evening paper for London, and Associated responded by turning its lite edition into a full competitor under a name of its own.
The Freesheet Battle of 2006
It was announced in August 2006 that the free paper would now be titled London Lite, in a move widely seen as a spoiler to protect Associated against the launch of News International's thelondonpaper on 4 September. London Lite launched a few weeks before its rival, in the second half of August, with a distribution of almost 360,000 copies at the start and a target print run of 400,000. Contemporary reporting put its hand-distribution force at 560 vendors, with up to 190 Standard vendors doubling up, and recorded that on one early day more than 387,000 copies of the 400,000 print run were picked up by readers.
News International's paper launched on the following Monday with a print run of 400,000 distributed by 700 merchandisers in London's Zone One transport area. The battle between the two freesheets was public and heated, with accusations of dirty tricks, circulated footage of distributors dumping copies, and rival claims about advertisers' preferences: Associated said advertiser feedback preferred the Lite's design by four to one, while thelondonpaper's camp described its own design as modern and fresh and the Lite as a cross between the Standard and a red-top. The paid-for Evening Standard, caught between its own free stablemate and the Murdoch challenger, saw its circulation fall from well over 300,000 to 263,000 by December 2006.
Content and Readership
London Lite was edited by Ted Young and was designed to be especially attractive to younger female readers. It featured a wide range of lifestyle articles, with less news and business news than the Standard, and celebrity gossip was given more coverage than international news. At the same time it reported in detail the incidents of violent crime in the capital, a staple of London evening journalism. After its relaunch as a stand-alone title it was handed out by its own street distributors rather than only by Standard vendors.
The formula was calibrated for the commute: a paper that could be read quickly, by readers who might not buy an evening paper at all, in the afternoon and evening hours in central London. Associated's free division presented it as a unique offering in the afternoon marketplace, and at its closure the company thanked its advertisers and clients for supporting it — and its one million daily readers, a readership figure well above its distribution, reflecting the pass-on readership typical of free commuter papers left on trains and in offices.
Circulation and Competition
For most of the battle, thelondonpaper led on distribution while London Lite held steady at around 400,000 copies. Audit figures for May 2007 showed thelondonpaper at about 486,600 copies against London Lite's total of just over 400,000; the Lite's figure that month was 400,229, almost unchanged on the previous month. In December of an earlier audit period its total was 400,692. By June 2009 London Lite was distributing an average of 400,741 copies each weekday, behind the 497,244 distributed by its rival — an average of around 500,000 that thelondonpaper maintained for much of the contest.
Both freesheets, meanwhile, sat well ahead of the Evening Standard they were indirectly attacking. The Standard had enjoyed a regular monthly circulation of more than 400,000 copies in 2003, before the free papers arrived; the two freesheets together put out around 800,000 copies a day, and Associated's own head of free newspapers conceded that this was bound to affect the Standard's sale a little. The economics were punishing for everyone: advertising-funded free papers depended on a buoyant market, and both titles were loss-making in the recession that followed.
The Litter Controversy
The most persistent criticism of London Lite and its rival was environmental. Like the other free London dailies, the paper was generally discarded by readers as soon as they had finished reading it, and the use of resources to print something with such a short lifespan was criticised on environmental grounds. Westminster City Council estimated that free newspapers made up a quarter of all rubbish in the West End, much of it unrecycled, although some stations positioned recycling bins at entrances and exits for the purpose. The council said the freesheets generated three to four extra tonnes of waste every day in Westminster, and put the clean-up bill for the papers at £111,000 a year.
The dispute escalated into regulation. Westminster considered invoking the Clean Neighbourhoods and Environment Act 2005, under which a local authority can ban the distribution of free literature that pollutes the environment, and it negotiated with both publishers over contributing to a recycling scheme it costed at £500,000 over two years. New rules passed by the council would have cut distribution points in Westminster by 30 per cent, required distributors to sweep up within a 100-metre radius at the end of each shift, and required distribution permits at named locations including Charing Cross and Embankment stations, Leicester Square and Charing Cross Road, Oxford Circus and Victoria station. Kensington and Chelsea likewise made the two papers cut the number of vendors distributing on its streets, partly in response to the rubbish problem.
Separation from the Evening Standard
On 21 January 2009 Associated's parent sold the Evening Standard — but not London Lite — to Alexander Lebedev, for a reported price of £1. With that sale the association between London Lite and the Standard was broken. London Lite remained owned by Associated Newspapers, like its free sister morning newspaper, Metro, the media group that also owns the Daily Mail. The Lite was now a free evening paper competing directly with a paid-for evening paper owned by someone else — an unstable position that the events of 2009 would resolve.
In July 2009 the online version of London Lite merged with that of Metro, Associated's morning freesheet, whose website became the online home of the material found in London Lite. The print paper continued, but its digital identity was absorbed into its sister title three months before the print edition faced its own reckoning.
The End of the Battle
The freesheet battle ended in stages in the autumn of 2009. News International announced in August that it planned to close thelondonpaper, which had recorded heavy losses, and that paper ceased publication on 18 September 2009 — two months before London Lite, despite its higher circulation. London's mayor, Boris Johnson, lamented its closure, saying it had become part of many people's daily lives. Ironically, the closing of thelondonpaper brought about the demise of London Lite: the Evening Standard, seeing a gap in the market, decided to become a free newspaper itself, dropping its 50-pence cover price from 12 October 2009.
With a full free Evening Standard now competing in the afternoon, Associated questioned the commercial viability of keeping a second, lighter free paper in the same market. The company had already been reviewing the Lite since the closure of its rival in September. On 27 October 2009 Associated Newspapers announced that it had entered into negotiations — a consultation — with staff over the future of the paper, placing around 35 jobs under threat. Steve Auckland, managing director of Associated Newspapers' Free Division, said that despite reaching a large audience with an excellent editorial format, the company was concerned about the commercial viability of the title in a highly competitive area.
The Final Edition
Following the consultation, Associated confirmed that the last edition of London Lite would appear on Friday 13 November 2009 — a date the staff had chosen themselves for the paper's swan song. Auckland thanked all the staff at the Lite for their enthusiasm and their contributions to the paper over the previous three years, saying it had been a pleasure to work with a small and highly motivated team, and thanked the agencies and clients who had supported a unique offering in the afternoon marketplace, and the paper's one million daily readers.
Contemporary analysis in the media trade press summarised the title's arc as a rise and fall: launched in the summer of 2006 to spoil a rival's entry into its publisher's market, it had achieved its strategic purpose — the rival closed first — only to be made redundant by its former parent paper's decision to go free. London Lite's final afternoon on the streets therefore signalled, as trade reporting put it, the end of the freesheet battle that had engulfed the capital for the previous three years.
Legacy
London Lite's legacy is that of the London freesheet war itself. For three years, Londoners were offered two free evening papers and a paid-for Standard; within two months in the autumn of 2009 they were left with a single free Evening Standard, a market structure that has endured. The Lite demonstrated both the reach of the free model — 400,000 copies a day and a claimed million readers — and its fragility: wholly dependent on advertising, and on its owner's wider strategy for London, it could be closed within weeks of the market changing.
The controversies it generated also had a lasting effect on how free distribution in the capital was regulated and discussed, from recycling schemes and distribution permits in Westminster to the audit arrangements for reporting dumped copies. As Standard Lite it had been a sampler; as London Lite it was a weapon in a circulation war. Both roles ended on 13 November 2009, and the name has not been revived.
