thelondonpaper

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THIS is the website of thelondonpaper.

The site and the newspaper were launched on 4 September 2006 and changed the face of London's media landscape.

The title was the first serious challenge to The Evening Standard's hegemony of the city's evening newspaper market for a generation.

The team of journalists behind the paper were determined to champion our dynamic and diverse capital, and brighten up the post-work commute.

The idea of a newspaper actually celebrating London (an actual tlp slogan) immediately resonated with Londoners and the circulation quickly topped 500,000. It had a readership in excess of 1.2 million, making it the No1 choice in the capital.

The fresh, European-style design proved a hit, as did columnists such as girl-about-town and boy-about-town and, more radically, their gay equivalents.

The mix of straight news and sports reporting, eye-catching celebrity stories, great arts coverage, and a host of quirky favourites such as the innovative Lovestruck column and the near-legendary Pet of the Day, also won over Londoners.

Editorially the aim was to reflect the full spectrum of London's community in a positive package which interacted with its audience, breaking down many of the barriers between journalist and reader.

The paper also pioneered the application of a 'free' business model to a premium product aimed primarily at 18-35-year-old commuters - a highly coveted market for advertisers. Use of integrated advertisements - with the stories fitted around dramatically cropped ad-images - and moving sport to the inside back pages, leaving the back page free for advertisers, were typical of the radical thinking which has since been adopted across the industry.

Every afternoon scores of vendors wearing our trademark purple fleeces would take to strategic positions across the city and hand out half a million copies to commuters.Well into the evening trains and buses would be packed with readers all enjoying thelondonpaper's deliberately concise and punchy mix of news and entertainment..

Sadly, thelondonpaper was forced to close on 18 September 2009.

It will be missed by hundreds of thousands of Londoners (as well as the journalists who created it).