thelondonpaper vs London Lite
A couple of days ago I wrote up
Today, London Lite competed side-by-side with thelondonpaper, the rival Murdoch-backed London afternoon freesheet that London Lite was launched to 'spoil', for the first time. Outside Victoria station, the two rival distribution teams hawked their respective newspapers on the same patches of pavement, mere metres from each other. I watched as each eagerly tried to make sure that passers-by took their paper whenever they took the other's. Amusingly, both newspapers, and distibution teams, are decked out in a shade of purple.
London Lite reacted the thelondonpaper's launch today with a spread about the paper on page 4 under the headline 'London Lite, the capital's FIRST free evening paper'. Given that it beat thelondonpaper to launch by a matter of days, this seems like a bit of a poor claim to fame, but I guess they're clinging onto any advantage they can think of. They also declare that the paper is 'printed with ink that WON'T rub off on your hands' - though I'm not sure which papers this claim is a sideswipe at. The paper continues its pushing of the 'user contributions' theme with another claim - '...and when you finish reading, start writing. And we'll make you famous'. No mention though of what you're meant to be writing or how they'll make you famous - again this shows a really poor grasp on user-generated-content and citizen journalism.
And so onto the first edition of thelondonpaper. It leads today on the same story as London Lite - that of the death of Australian Steve Irwin - but inside the paper seems slightly different. The page 2 intro to to the paper contains a fairly simple welcome message:
'Here's a paper with a new attitude - we know how you feel when you leave work - we want to help you enjoy the city we all love, smile on the way home and get the most out of your night ahead'.
They also introduce a new website - thelondonpaper.com, which is interesting as London Lite is backed up by a pre-existing website, thisislondon.co.uk, which has supported the Evening Standard paper for some time. I'll try to compare both websites in more detail later in the week.
Both London Lite and thelondonpaper seem fairly heavy on celebrity news, but the latter seems to be the slightly more serious one so far, and with a higher percentage of London stories. In today's edition, thelondonpaper seems to have a minor scoop with the first reporting of a new transport masterplan for the 2012 Olympics, in which the newest news is a £223 million contract for the North London Line to be signed on Wednesday. Coupled with a report on the battle to save the Astoria music venue, the launch of a new gourmet market at Spitalfields and an interview with Ken Livingstone, it certainly seems to push local news more than its rival. They even publish a version of the future tube map [pdf].
Potential reader-interaction in thelondonpaper is so far limited to a letters page and a vote over whether columnists can continue to write (the first of which - a Polish imigrant - seems pretty good). The URL thelondonpaper.com/contribute is plugged a few times though, so maybe this is an area in which they too have ambitions.
Features I liked within thelondonpaper include a 'thelondoninfo' page, which today had a feature on 24 hour chemists and where in London you can buy live lobster, and a 'greenlondon' page. There's still plenty of pages I'm not interested in however, such as the celebrity, fashion, romance and sports sections however.
There's also no escaping the fact that the newspaper is owned by News International, which also owns Sky. An editorial makes the laughable statement that they have been 'lucky' to have signed the Sky Sports rota of commentators, but the several adverts for Sky+ and the inclusion of Sky One alongside the terrestial TV listings makes the paper's allegiences a little more obvious.
Neither paper has had any particularly hard-hitting news so far, and both are politically very dull, but so far I'm definitely preferring thelondonpaper. Whether it'll be good enough to make me continue to pick it up every afternoon remains to be seen however.
Update: Coverage elsewhere. Charles Arthur says thelondonpaper is dead, whilst Wordblog says it went for 'predictable stuff'. Meanwhile, flashboy.org does a detailed analysis of the two papers, from his 'unique' position of being 'someone with a history of launching unsuccessful London afternoon freesheets'. Adam Bowie compares the two, with additional reference to the Evening Standard, and concludes that he probably wont read any of them much.