By Community Correspondant Peter Lidbetter With the closure of London’s afternoon free evening paper, The London Paper due to the crippling losses it suffered in the past two years of over £29 million, will other local papers closer to home suffer a similar fate in the economic downturn?

The London Paper was far from underperforming. In July, the paper was distributing over 500 000 copies, approximately 100 000 more than its main rival, the London Lite. The ongoing battle between the two had been going on since the two papers’ creation only five days apart around September 2006. It was enough to force London’s Evening Standard to be sold off to a Russian businessman. Yet despite both papers seeming to be doing well, the London Paper reported staggering losses in its final year, which can be attributed to loss in advertising demand due to the economic downturn.

All papers rely on advertising for at least a large proportion of their income. A drop in advertising demand would surely hit all newspapers hard; especially as – this summer – parliament has been debating withdrawing funds from local newspapers on the verge of bankruptcy. Other reasons include a rise in internet use and television for local news stories, which are both easier to come by and – with many phones now with internet access built in – just as portable. Kingston area newspapers are also under more threat than some other areas, because the south-west of London is one of the areas with best internet access in the country with almost all connections with at least a 2Mbps speed. On a global scale, since December 1995 the percentage of people using the internet has increased from less than 1% to almost 25%.

Almost all businesses are being put under the wire because of the recession, but the strength of the competition in the newspaper world and the requirements for papers to be very cheap to the consumers mean that a sudden change is particularly difficult to cope with.

Already many local papers in the Kingston area are forced to devote their entire front page to advertising. There is also a rise on the number of human interest stories and an almost frantic distribution policy visible in some papers.

If the recession continues to lower the levels of advertising demand, the London Paper may be just the first of local newspapers to be added to its death toll.