Stop press: it’s the very last Evening Standard in London today. And that tells us a lot about Britain in 2024 | James Hanning

Local, national, international – the weekday paper was a brilliant one-stop shop. But information, and how we get it, is more atomised now

Local daily to close.” Ultimately, that is the truth. From today, London’s Evening Standard is indeed ceasing to appear every weekday, as it has for almost 200 years. Yet you don’t have to have worked there for more than 15 years, as I did, to regard it as so much more than just a local rag.

It will live as a website, with a once a week print edition, the London Standard. But it’s certainly a moment. The reach of the Standard as we have known it was huge, if implicit. Though its print edition was largely restricted to the capital, it used to be referred to, without irony, as “the influential London Evening Standard”. How long ago that seems.

James Hanning is a former opinion editor of the Evening Standard, an ex deputy editor of the Independent on Sunday and author of The News Machine, about the phone hacking at the News of the World

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from The Guardian https://ift.tt/hGJNIAl