London Daily News

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1 1987
2 April 2008
3 1846-1930
4 References

[edit] 1987

The London Daily News was a short-lived London newspaper owned by Robert Maxwell. It was published from 24 February to 23 July 1987. It was intended to be a "24-hour" paper challenging the local dominance of the Evening Standard."For the city that never sleeps, the paper that never stops", ran the slogan.^[1] The Standard’s owners, Associated Newspapers, responded by re-launching the defunct Evening News at a lower price to squeeze the London Daily News out of the market. A price war ensued finishing with the London Daily News selling at 10p and the Evening News at 5p.

Maxwell was dismissive when he heard about the cut-price Evening News. He told the BBC: "The Evening Standard and Lord Rothermere are so worried about their monopoly - which the London Daily News is finally breaking - and so scared about the huge demand for our paper, that they've brought out a cheapo Evening News, which is really a joke." After the London Daily News collapsed, The Evening Standard 's publishers, Associated Newspapers saw that the Evening News had done its job and then re-absorbed it into Evening Standard. The London Daily News was the first home of the Alex cartoon, later published by The Independent and the Daily Telegraph.^[2]

Maxwell had conceded defeat on 25 July 1987 an hour after paying undisclosed damages to Associated Newspapers for accusing it of lying about the Evening Standard 's circulation figures. Starting the London Daily News, which published four editions a day, had cost him $40 million (about £ 24.96 million), the New York Times estimated.^[3] His paper was “selling less than 100,000 copies, when minimum sales targets were 200,000 by this time".

Four years later, Maxwell vanished in mysterious circumstances from his yacht in the Atlantic.^[4] His empire was found to be at least £1 billion (about US $1.74 billion) in debt^[5] and his companies’ pensions funds were short of £400 million (about US $697.08 million) the UK’s Department of Trade and Industry reported in 2001.^[6]

[edit] April 2008

The London Daily News has now been relaunched as an online newspaper The London Daily News by media analyst John Kaponi of IPM Media.

[edit] 1846-1930

Charles Dickens had used the name Daily News for a radical London newspaper he founded in 1846. The paper was not a commercial success. He edited 17 issues before handing over the editorship over to his friend John Foster, who had more experience of journalism than Dickens. He ran the paper until 1870.^[7] Charles Mackay, Harriet Martineau, George Bernard Shaw, Henry Massingham and H. G. Wells were among the leading reformist writers who wrote for the paper. In 1901 Quaker chocolate manufacturer George Cadbury bought the Daily News and used the paper to campaign for old age pensions and against sweated labour. As a pacifist, Cadbury opposed the Boer War – and the Daily News followed his line.

The Daily News merged with the Daily Chronicle to form the centre-left News Chronicle in 1930, and in October 1960, four years after opposing the UK's military support of Israel in invading the Suez canal zone in 1956, the News Chronicle 'finally folded, inappropriately, into the grip' ^[8] of the centre-right Daily Mail. (The New York Times, among others, incorrectly in 1884 referred to Dickens's paper as the The London Daily News.^[9])