thelondonpaper

Lots of news keeps coming out about News International’s new free evening newspaper – thelondonpaper (yes – it’s all lower case seemingly).
It’s going to be distributed, at least initially, by a team of 700 people in zone 1 of London. They’re talking about 400,000 papers a day. Because Transport for London has yet to award an afternoon franchise to use tube stations for paper distribution, News International is bypassing it and going to use people to hand the papers out on the streets. You don’t need permission for that.
So commuters are going to reach tube stations and find they have a choice of either paying 40p for the Evening Standard from the vendor, or taking a free 48 page paper from a distributor. Depending on what the quality of content is like, this could mean some major changes in the London market.
Of course Associated are not going to take this sitting down, so it’s going to be really interesting to see what kind of big guns they bring out. Massive promotions? Or do they go free themselves?
One final thing that does surprise me a little – the name of the paper. thelondonpaper.com was registered back in February so they’ve been mulling it for a while, but it doesn’t leave them much space for taking their product further afield. In fact, they’ve already registered plenty of other “papers”. A quick check reveals themanchesterpaper.com, thebirminghampaper.com, theglasgowpaper.com, thecardiffpaper.com and theliverpoolpaper.com. I guess that’s fair warning to every regional and local evening around the country that News International is looking at your marketplace. Mind you, it looks like thenorwichpaper.com is available at time of writing…