Russian billionnaire Alexander Lebedev has announced that the London Evening standard will be given away for free from 12^th October.

Lebedev bought a majority stake in the Standard from Associated Newspapers earlier in the year.  With News International’s free London Paper closing down last month, there will be speculation about the fate of the London Lite.   Despite being owned by Associated and getting much of its content from the same source as the Standard, the Lite competes directly with its ‘sister’ title and has demonstrably taken readers away from the paid for daily.

Lebedev maintains that quality standards will be maintained: “The Standard has been producing exceptional journalism since 1827 and that is not going to change under my ownership”.  He is predicting the circulation will more than double from 250,000 to 600,000 copies a day – higher than the 450,000 circulation the Standard enjoyed before it had to compete with free rivals back at the turn of the millennium.

Lebedev is also predicting other newspapers will go free: “The London Evening Standard is the first leading quality newspaper to go free and I am sure others will follow”.  But doesn’t this move to free media fly in the face of Rupert Murdoch’s plans to charge not only for newspapers but for online content too?

Murdoch’s argument is that people will pay for quality content: “Just make our content better and differentiate it.  If we are successful, we will be followed by all the media.”  This reasoning works for a niche business site such as the Wall Street Journal which has enjoyed an increase in subscriptions by offering unique content to those that value it but will this be the same of commodity news and celebrity gossip?  Critic of the traditional media owners approach Jeff Jarvis argues that commodity news inevitably ends up being free - “if the news is that important, it will find me”.

A recent Harris Interactive poll backs this view up.  Faced with their favourite news site starting to charge, three in four people would find another free site at an alternative.  In the UK there is a long term ‘free’ competitor in the form of the BBC.  Many media owners are concerned that this forces them to offer free content in response.  However as media commentator Matthew Horsman has pointed out, it’s difficult to point to the BBC since exactly the same problem is happening in the States where commercial sites have deliberately chosen to become free in order to compete with one another.

The strange thing about this is that many of us are willing to pay for content for TV – indeed Ofcom figures show that nearly half of all television households in the UK are now choosing to pay for additional TV channels.  We pay for TV primarily because we like the content but we also we like the convenience of paying for something as a bundled subscription, and then consuming what you want, when you want, without worrying about the cost.

With the relaunch and apparent success of SkyPlayer (which allows sky TV content to be viewed over the internet) maybe the solution for the Murdochs is to bundle subscriptions to their key newspaper brands in with the Sky subscripton.  At least it would keep everything in the family.