So on Monday, FleetStreetBlues picked up a copy of the relaunched Evening Standard on the way home. It was free, part of a promotional giveaway on the first day of the relaunch.
It was impressive. Not being a regular reader, it was hard to tell exactly what had changed (the Media Guardian has a point-by-point analysis). But compared to the usual evening commute glance at thelondonpaper or the London Lite, it was a breath of fresh air. Strong, new, news. In-depth comment and features. Sport which you actually wanted to read. It was great.
So what happened on day two? I walked right past the Evening Standard with an armful of free papers. Sorry, but 50p? For a distraction on the tube, when I've been reading news websites all day and have the internet at home? Blame it on the credit crunch...
In reality, despite the high-profile 'Sorry' ad campaign, the Evening Standard's declining circulation is a problem for the publisher, not the editor. Rival media, the rise of the free papers, the global recession and distribution headaches - these are outside editorial's control.
But if a highly professional redesign and relaunch can't do the trick, then the question remains, what can editorial do to help win back readers?
It's easy to be an armchair editor, but for what it's worth, here's our suggestion...
There are two kinds of readers editorial may be able to win back. One is those facing a long commute, who want something more substantial than the free papers, something they can work their way through and which lasts longer. The redesign seems to have taken care of this, although the emphasis should be on keeping it hefty and including lengthy features as well as plenty of news (the piece by Tom Wolfe was excellent in this regard).
And the second? It's about hard news. The only thing which would make me buy the Standard on impulse, as I'm walking home, would be a geniunely startling headline, one that I haven't already seen online before leaving work, and one that I can't ignore.
Remember the days when newspaper vendors would shout improbable headlines followed by a cheeky 'Readallaboutit', and readers would just have to grab a copy. (No, us neither, but we've seen it in films). That should be what the Standard is aiming for.
It already breaks more than its fair share of stories, and thanks to its timing, geniunely helps set the wider news agenda. But why not take that to the next level? Why not completely scale back its general news coverage, relying more on wire copy for the stories that readers will already have seen or heard about elsewhere anyway, and put all its spare resources into investigative journalism?
Teams of reporters would be dedicated to digging up unlikely scoops in all sorts of fields, from politics to celebrity journalism, along the lines of a Sunday paper. The stories would be need to be tied closely to the current news agenda, of course - commuters would have little patience for left-field Independent-style splashes. But every day the newspaper vendor's sandwich boards would be plastered with one jaw-dropping expose after another - so jaw-dropping that there and then readers would be willing to part with their 50p.
Could it work? Probably not. Probably the Standard already does as much as it can to break new stories, and can't scale back wider news coverage any more. Probably readers wouldn't care anyway, and wait to read the scoop in the next morning's Metro.
But it would be nice to think that in the struggle to somehow make newspapers profitable again, investigative journalism could be part of the solution rather than the problem.
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