Star P.M., the Toronto Star’s afternoon edition, closed in October 2007, barely a year after it first appeared. It had been published as a downloadable PDF — an evening paper delivered as a file rather than on newsprint.
The Star’s editor-in-chief, Fred Kuntz, said the PDF was being scrapped because of advances in technology, and that it would be replaced by “two more powerful products, offering greater flexibility, interactivity and value”: a new mobile service at mobile.thestar.com, and improvements to the newspaper’s website.
The verdict here was that the experiment had been worth running even though it had not found the audience the Star wanted, and that the paper deserved credit for trying a new way of reaching one. The replacement was the more interesting signal. A dedicated mobile news service made sense in 2007 in a way it would not have a year earlier, because reaching a website from a phone had become dramatically easier in that time — which is also why an afternoon edition delivered as a file to a desktop had stopped making sense.