London's Evening Standard axes daily print edition

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cyrr0yex40yo

by bookofjoe • 2 years ago

42 49 2 years ago

MattGaiser• 2 years ago

The Evening Standard was bought by businessman and former Russian intelligence officer Alexander Lebedev and his son Evgeny in 2009.
The Lebedevs also bought the Independent in 2010, and scrapped that paper's print edition entirely six years later.

A Russian intelligence officer owning two major UK newspapers seems like a seriously undercovered story.

elzbardico• 2 years ago

Lebedev is known opositor of Putin. So, it doesn't matter if he is a corrupt oligarch, we put him on the good guys column.

mikeyouse• 2 years ago

Bit of a deeper dive gives a very different picture..

https://bylinetimes.com/2022/03/15/lebedev-the-kgb-spy-who-h...

Britain’s spies were not worried too much about the boy, Evgeny, a seemingly self-obsessed featherweight who once, while freelancing for the BBC, asked Alexander Lukashenko, the strongman of Belarus, what he thought about group sex. Their anxiety focussed on the father, a once and maybe current KGB/FSB actor, who helped put Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin. All of Evgeny’s money flows from this single fact, that Putin was grateful to his father for his service as a spy and he was rewarded handsomely for it. And Alexander Lebedev still owes fealty to the master of the Kremlin.
On the face of it, Alexander Lebedev looks like a model anti-Putin oligarch. He’s big mates with Mikhail Gorbachev with whom he part-owned the now closed Novaya Gazeta, the last good newspaper in Russia. He’s a liberal, or poses as such, and, like his son, he’s thick with the luvvies: friends with Kevin Spacey, John Malkovich, Sir Elton John, Ralph Fiennes who plays M in the Bond movies and Hugh Grant.
No wonder Boris Johnson ignored warnings from MI6 that the Lebedevs were to be avoided. But look into Alexander Lebedev’s past and the story gets dark, very quickly.

mathieuh• 2 years ago

That’s Lord Lebedev to you. Almost unbelievably he was given a peerage by Boris Johnson.

It was a big story in the UK for a while, Johnson also attended a party at Lebedev’s villa in Italy after a NATO conference.

bitwize• 2 years ago

So a Russian national was given a peerage by a PM named Boris? That's not sus...

vasco• 2 years ago

I think you mean Baron Lebedev, of Hampton in the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames and of Siberia in the Russian Federation.

Monarchy is ridiculous, lol. Lets keep giving these people validation like this.

surfingdino7• 2 years ago

He got his peerage nomination whilst Dominic Cummings was Johnson's advisor. I am not sure if the fact that Cummings lived in Russia from his graduation till 1997 has had any bearing on this nomination.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominic_Cummings

denton-scratch2• 2 years ago

As far as I'm aware, he's never participated in a Lord's debate, nor voted on a motion.

rorylawless• 2 years ago

What's more, Evgeny Lebedev sits in the House of Lords. Despite the sanctions following the invasion of Ukraine, Britain is still lousy with Russian oligarchs with a worrying amount of influence.

yardstick• 2 years ago

Seems a little unfair? Wikipedia indicates he’s lived in the UK since he was 8, and obtained citizenship in 2010.

There’s probably a case to be made for not allowing any Lords or MPs unless they are British by birth rather than naturalisation or descent.

TrainedMonkey• 2 years ago

My layman understanding is that Russians own a lot of UK, largely financed by revenues from oil and other natural resources.

ClumsyPilot• 2 years ago

We allow shell companies with unknown owners to own anything. At least this guy is a known quantity

keiferski4• 2 years ago

I haven’t read the Evening Standard, but last year I subscribed to a daily paper delivery of a different one (the Financial Times).

My thoughts on the content are mixed but generally positive, but for the actual delivery of a daily physical newspaper to my mailbox thing, I really enjoy it. There is something much more real about it as compared to scrolling through endless news articles online or going through yet another email newsletter. If I’m in public at a cafe/on the subway etc. I also feel more present and focused vs. using my phone.

I actually think there may be a revival of print media, especially as the Internet gets increasingly crowded and filled with ads. The newspaper has ads of course but they are considerably less distracting. It will likely be more of a niche high quality product, though.

codazoda• 2 years ago

I never understood the newspaper format. Seems like a paperback would be a better format though I guess that would be a magazine.

keiferski4• 2 years ago

The folding paper format itself is a little annoying, especially if it’s windy. I probably wouldn’t mind if they used the same paper but had it folded magazine-style, but I suppose there is some historical tradition in not doing so.

tivert• 2 years ago

I never understood the newspaper format. Seems like a paperback would be a better format though I guess that would be a magazine.

Define "better." Newspapers don't need staples, and (at least historically) they could be very large and thick. The non-bound aspect allowed them to be easily split and shared between multiple people.

surfingdino7• 2 years ago

They are a great shield from the rest of the people on the Tube. I think of them as portable private spaces for crowded environments. Oh, and you can read them. Also great for wrapping fish and chips in.

thom• 2 years ago

Coupled with deleting my Twitter account, having a newspaper subscription has given me a much more mindful relationship with the news. It’s also just some space carved into my day, and as I’ve grown older I’ve realised how much I value these little physical rituals. I still suck at the cryptic crossword though.

scrollop• 2 years ago

Well, perhaps there will be a small revival, just as there has been with vinyl and film cameras, however compared to the "mainstream" these will likely be very small.

If anything, I think it's more likely that people will invest their news via new means especially AI platforms.

I use chatgpt's voice to hear the latest news instead of staring at a screen but it's clunky -

1. Waiting for the new voice so that we can speed up cadence and interrupt 2. I would prefer to talk to a news service directly with voice rather than relying on an ai platform to give me the news as I can't beg due the platform won't give me less trustworthy sources etc news corp

Ideally, I could log into Reuters or whatever site I want and talk with it about the news, and the same for anything (recipe sites, Reddit, whatever)

Teever• 2 years ago

AI voice + video generation is a really cool (probably in a Marshall Mcluhan sense too) and natural extension of the 24/7 CNN type media/news distribution but amongst other things it lacks a major thing that the printed word has -- immutability.

A newspaper is distinct from the radio / nightly news / 24/7 news network type journalism and that key distinction is that once it's in your hands it's yours until you give it up. It's that piece of the past that you can hold in your hands to let you know that the things that you remember actually happened in the way they happened.

There's something magical about these artifacts, the ones you can hold in your hands, look at with your eyes, smell with your noses, and hear with your ears, it's a physical thing that exists irrespective of the whims of some tin-pot dictator. Possessing this kind of artifact gives the bearer some sort of power -- an ability to resist those tin-pot dictators -- and that's why certain kinds of people want to burn them or trick people into stuffing them into a memory hole.

I wonder what we lose forever if we don't have these sort of physical and immutable mediums for communicating ideas, and I hope we can find a way to maintain them. I acknowledge that it may not be feasible to do so on a large scale, but I hope that we can find a way to keep them alive in some local form.

keiferski4• 2 years ago

That’s all true, but I do think there is a burgeoning “back to physical things” counterculture. It might take a decade or two to not be an obscure thing, but culture does work in cycles.

KaiserPro4• 2 years ago

It sounds like What you're after is good quality radio. radio 4's world at one is rather good, and have a nice mix.

The FT prototyped a way to make podcast/article reading interactive. The problem was that we didn't have an LLM to answer the question, so they were stuck on hacking alex's awful API.

The problem with wire services is that they tend to only have light detail. You need a different service for analysis/investigation. (this is different to opinion, which is really just cheap news replacement.)

surfingdino7• 2 years ago

Niche print zines and magazines seem to be surviving. Not sure about newspapers. They literally could not give Evening Standard away for free (it was paid for by advertising).

keiferski4• 2 years ago

The Financial Times seems to be doing well. But it’s a premium product for an audience with money.

I think they are probably a good model for future newspapers, whereas the evening standard seems to be a general newspaper without much to distinguish it from the competition.

KaiserPro4• 2 years ago

The FT has over a million paying subscribers.

eesmith• 2 years ago

A couple of weeks ago I subscribed to a newspaper, and opted for print delivery. (delivered digital every day, of which 4 days are also print).

Wow, do I enjoy it, for all the reasons you mentioned. Just the act of folding the page means a natural break to look around, contributing to the "more present" feeling.

Plus, if I take a break from coding I get to stop looking at a screen. And it's a lot easier to recover where I was, since the text has a connection to a physical location.

My spouse also reads it, and sometimes writes commentary to share with me when I read it later.

k1t• 2 years ago

The Evening Standard was a newspaper that was available for free pickup at most London train/tube stations.

Many commuters picked up a copy to read on their journey home.

I don't think it was ever intended to compete with newspapers you paid to have delivered to your house.

louthy2• 2 years ago

It wasn’t always free. It did originally compete with other newspapers.

Once Metro went free then it was inevitable the Standard would have to too. It seems even that model is not working for the Oligarch owner.

surfingdino7• 2 years ago

If you are in the spying business, an online edition makes it easier than the print edition.

Engineering-MD• 2 years ago

True, although you could always consider cutting a hole in your newspaper and spying through that. Seems to be a favourite of spies.

surfingdino7• 2 years ago

That's proper spycraft.

NikkiA• 2 years ago

The truly great thing about online news is that nothing is stopping them from serving different demographics different, conflicting, news.

London's Evening Standard axes daily print edition

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