How do they do it? Here's how (The Evening Standard)

Name: Walli10

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Product:	The Evening Standard
Date:	05/06/01 (214 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Cheap and comprehensive

Disadvantages: Politically slanted

The best thing about the standard is the amazing ability of their newsdesk to turn around stories. They can have a full report, plus pic, on a paper available across London just hours after a story breaks. I have to say that as a journalist, I was always impressed by this - and having now worked there, I am even more so.

The Evening Standard publishes several issues a day. The first one comes on sale about 10ish and my advice is don't bother buying it till after about 1pm. The shifts start at 9am, so that their morning edition is put together the night before and updated using wires and there's rarely anything fresh in it. The later editions are the up-to-date ones that the day's journalists have been working on.

Working there is, as it sounds, a nightmare. You have no time to think, and no-one's got time to be nice to you. Yet sometimes against my better judgement I still really love this paper. It's a tabloid evening publication for London, and is somewhere between a national and a local paper - it has the staff and resources of a national, but is very good at sticking to its local remit.

So, what's to like? It's other main strength, to my mind, is easily it's columnists. It's done a better job of nurturing distinctive, witty and entertaining writers on a variety of subjects than any other paper I know. It's art critic, Brian Sewell, is probably the only art critic anyone's ever heard of - so good that he's got his own page to ramble on about any old stuff. His prose style is convoluted and deliberately pompous but very entertaining to my mind. Their girl about town, Zoe Williams, is one of the few people I will read whatever she writes on and their fashion editor (recently promoted to editing their Friday magazine, Mimi Rogers, is also ace. It is the only paper which I would consider buying for the columnists alone (and that includes Matthew Parris in the Times, who's a genuis) r><br>
Other reasons I like it: it really knows the city, no easy task as anyone who lives here knows. Its restaurant reviews etc are generally very good and much less pretentious than their time out versions. Their film cricic, Alexander Walker is another local legend who moonlights as a columnist and their theatre is pretty good, tho they have an irritating tendency to criticise for the sake of it. The cartoonist is also ace. They are also very good at being a campaigining paper, which is brilliant because they've pretty much got a monopoly here and if they didn't, a lot of things wouldn't get said. Notably, they've campaigned for a London mayor, for the PPP plans for the Tube to be scrapped, against the Dome and have done some excellent work on transport in general. They are very good at making all their coverage as relevant to their readers as possible, with an emphasis on the human angle to stories and series on particular train and tube rides.

So what's wrong? Well, they're as prone to misogyny as the next Associated Press publication (see the Mail) - yesterday's headline about "woman judge being attacked" - would they have bothered to say Male judge? I think not. Or the other day when a female MP who's married to another MP was attacked and the headline referred to MP's wife - a combination of a failure to fact-check and a (male) assumption that if her husband's an MP her status is as his wife. Laziness and sexism - a bad combination. They aren't quite as rabid about asylum seekers and certainly aren't racist, but can be quite innacurate and selective in their coverage or such stories.