This is the pile of Evening Standards in the stairwell at Mile End station. More to the point it's the pile of Friday's Evening Standards left over on a Sunday afternoon, and blimey there are a heck of a lot of them. I doubt these hoppers were full on Friday evening but I bet they were the same height, and the pile on the right is closer to the top of the stairs so has probably had more taken. There must be well over 100 unread copies here, which given it's now first thing Monday morning will already have been taken away and replaced by a stack of more popular Metros, and basically what an incredible waste of paper.
The Evening Standard is really thin these days, a measly 24 pages. That said it does still contain genuine news as well as features, finance, sport and a page of puzzles to help while away your journey home. The website has more content but it must still pay to get the physical version into Londoners' hands, despite the fact that advertisers aren't exactly queueing up to fill them. Friday's edition has just one full-page advert - that's Easyjet on the back cover - plus two half-pages, three quarter-pages and a tiny classified section on page 19. Four pages of advertising isn't going to make any newspaper publisher rich, particularly if thousands of copies end up unread at the end of the day.
It's great that London still has an evening paper, even if it's put to bed before lunchtime and is essentially an oligarch's plaything. But it's a trifle suspicious that the Evening Standard still claims to have a circulation of almost half a million, especially given how many of those are never picked up, let alone opened, merely sent off to be pulped, day in, day out, until economic reality finally bites.
