Their history has contained its dark side but in publishing terms

Their history has contained its dark side, but in publishing terms it has always been innovative and usually successful. Who would have thought that the Metro titles, found on public transport in major cities, would have been so successful?Once the paper of the capital’s cultural, financial and social elite, selling 750,000 and more copies a day, the Standard now sells about 370,000. Changing work patterns, changing demographics, and changing media brought about declining sales for the one surviving London evening. This pattern is reflected in evening papers (or, more accurately, afternoon papers) nationwide. This is a sector of the newspaper market where “managing decline” is the term used in the boardroom.So can Standard Lite save the Standard? Will Lite lead to all Standards being free? Veronica Wadley, the editor, says no, but then she has to.

The Northcliffe/Rothermere dynasty started the Mail in 1896 and the Daily Mirror in 1903. Standard Lite went on the streets of the capital last Tuesday, the first paper, I imagine, ever to use an invented word in its titlepiece. And beer begat a free newspaper.
There has of course been a mass of comment – most of it concentrating on the circulation decline of Standard “heavy”, the traditional paid-for product still available for 40p. Whatever they say in public, there is in private a degree of awe felt towards Associated Newspapers, publishers of the Daily Mail, The Mail on Sunday, the Metro series of free morning newspapers, and the London Evening Standard Associated tends to get things right. The Mail, over the years, has bucked the circulation decline which has afflicted most papers. Its editor-in-chief, Paul Dacre, is not loved by all, but he is deeply respected. “Sorry, I thought everyone knew,” says Kay, in an orange shirt and a purple jacket (Tristans think they all wear that up there, being gloriously authentic and tasteless).

Then off on honeymoon they go, John Smith’s cans trailing behind the car. Hey, slice of life.Peter sru.co.uk. So the year ends with another of those possibly landmark developments in newspapers, the free London evening paper. They think they’re more real than themselves; it’s a philosophical conundrum.

They’ve always rather fancied Bernard Manning, they definitely went a bundle on three-chins Johnny Vegas (even the otherwise marvellous Paul Whitehouse, hardly a Tristan, seems to think Vegas is deeply talented, so nobody’s perfect) and they’re dead keen on Peter Kay They claim to have watched whole episodes of Phoenix Nights. That wonderful world of residual 1982 in 2004: horrible food, gash clothes that no real working-class Northerner wears now and the Radio 2 playlist.Tristans are very hot on retrospective cool and rediscovered demotic tastes, but you just know that in the Eighties they’d really have been reading Derrida and listening to Eno’s ambient music. All this by way of saying I’ve never got Peter Kay but I know lots of people who say they do.The marvel of having a successful TV comedy series now, the cream- and-jam millefeuille of it all, is that you get DVD/video sales and ads. We’re all a bit shy of cultural imperialism now Not just with foreigners but with provincial folk too. There was a comedian at the Royal Variety Performance last week whose entire act seemed to be built around being the last RP-speaking upper-middle left alive and qualifying for persecuted minority status

We’re all a bit shy of cultural imperialism now Not just with foreigners but with provincial folk too. They retain higher levels of iron in
the body than women, particularly in space, and this iron can reach toxic
levels.

Women’s reduced mass, requiring fewer calories and producing less
waste, makes them yet more suitable as long-term astronauts.

However, there is one major biological hurdle of younger women. Menstruation,
he warns, presents particular problems during space-walks because it
increases the dangers of decompression sickness from decreased total blood
volume.

But overall, women would be much better placed than men to take a trip to Mars
– a mission which is expected to last around two years.. Kay has a new John Smith’s commercial – it’s that John Smith’s Bitter, home of flat caps and the jumping dog. He’s in his Phoenix Nights role of entertainer/DJ doing the closing half-hour of a Northern wedding when there’s hardly anyone left on the dance floor.