Evening Standard to increase circulation in move toward profitability

The London Evening Standard will increase its circulation in October in a possible move towards profitability for the paper.

The Standard, which went free in October 2009, will begin distributing an additional 100,000 to increase circulation to 700,000. According to figures presented by managing director Andrew Mullins, the Standard is now bigger in London in circulation terms than the Guardian, Independent and Financial Times.

Recent figures filed at Companies House, suggest a £28.3m loss for the Standard in the 10 months to early October last year. But reports last month by the Guardian suggest the title broke even for the first time since its new owners took control in January last year, reducing its operating cost base by £20 million, including some redundancies, and production costs of £1.1 million are now reported to be offset the same amount in advertising revenue.

"We have to stop losing money, stabilise the business model and then increase circulation," Mullins told an audience at Northcliffe House at an event organised by the Greater London Group of the Chartered Institute of PR.

But October's planned increase in circulation will not see a dramatic growth in circulation area, said editor Geordie Greig.

"We are still on a journey to fully find a cast iron or perhaps cast gold future. We've a lot still to do, it's not easy. The newspaper industry is in pretty unstable form, there are questions we don't know the answer too. We've got to be agile, dynamic, entrepreneurial, bold, and humble," said the former Tatler editor, who took over the Standard's editorship in February 2009.

Speaking about the Standard's sale to Russian oligarch Alexander Lebedev, Greig added: "We see ourselves as independent and freshly minted with our new ownership. It has been a year of great drama for us because we have new owners. The most dramatic moment in my professional life was calling up the Lebedevs and saying I think you should by the ES and they said 'OK' (…) The Lebedevs think a central pillar of democracy is a free press. There's a serious side to us and a need to keep tight reins on money. We're not in profit yet."

Mullins said the Standard's relaunch in the past year was a move to "follow the readers" and followed research conducted in January 2009 into how the paper was perceived by its readers, which later prompted the controversial 'Sorry' advertising campaign.

"The reality of the situation wasn't actually the way we perceived things - people on the street had a very different perception of us than what we wanted to offer (…) they wanted the Standard to be [politically] neutral and open-minded. This was a really difficult message for people who had been on the paper for years," he said.

Despite changes made to better address readers' demands, which had a positive effect on circulation, Mullins said this strategy with a paid-for paper could not outweigh the downturn in advertising spend: "Money was dripping away as fast as you could imagine from all our revenues."

The title is already planning for an increase in newsprint prices and this will challenge but not break the paper's new free-print model, he added.

When asked about the future of the industry as a whole, Greig said digital would play a huge part, but urged listeners not to underestimate the longevity of print. The cost of producing an edition of the Standard since its relaunch has dropped from 40p to 4p, he said.

The Standard's website has not received much investment - though this is planned, he said. But the title's mobile news application, which is available across all smartphones, has proved particularly successful, he said, with more than 100,000 downloads to date.

Image courtesy of Paul Downey on Flickr

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