“(Our website) has regular traffic that it monetises but doesn’t quite break even,” Mullins acknowledges. But a big strategic shift for the website isn’t any time soon. “The focus right now is on making the newspaper into a profitable entity. Digital would never deliver the same revenue. It can contribute to it but never on its own.”

Digital at the Standard is thought of purely as incremental revenue. It announced an iPhone app that will debut in March, which will be free and ad-supported. Despite a $9.99 monthly Kindle subscription, free remains the template for all of the Evening Standard‘s digital content. “At almost zero cost, digital content can be free and monetised through sponsorship or advertising,” Mullins adds.

—So why all the free love?: The print switch was a “quirk of our geography” in a city of affluent readers that advertisers love, Mullins reckons. “It’s not that we don’t think content is not worth paying for. We absolutely do. When you have a paid-for title and you are nationally distributed, paid content is critical.”

—Lebedev clicked ‘undo’ on DMGT’s mutant: Even before Russian mogul Alexander Lebedev acquired the title, DMGT was moving to what Mullins calls a “hybrid model”, with some copies given free. “What became clear was that running different models concurrently is expensive,” he concedes. It was the decision to give away 100,000 free copies after May’s relaunch, under Lebedev, that convinced Mullins it could get wider distribution on a lower cost base. He rejected an idea of transitioning to free through part-free: “We went free to be free forever with no intention to go back to pricing.”

—How are advertisers responding?: London Lite and thelondonpaper freesheets may have both folded during one of the most pronounced advertising downturns, but Mullins says London Evening Standard rates raised “significantly” when its circulation rose to 600,000 on the free move. But he reckons the increase has been modest, considering the paper reaches 1.4 million total readers: “We are providing excellent value in terms of cost per 1,000. This means we will have scope to raise rates further either as the market recovers or if our relative position strengthens - but not just yet.”

—When will it turn a profit?: The paper is still loss-making but may turn a profit if it sticks to the three-year plan Mullins says was drawn up with the free strategy: “Losses are reducing week on week. You could draw a striaght line down in our projections. There is the absolute likelihood that we will move to breaking even. As newspaper audiences are dwindling, if you can put out 600,000 copies every day and guarantee it to an upmarket audience, you can predict to grow and sustain print revenues into the future.” But Mullins appears to fear another freesheet war in the capital: “As long as well-financed competitors don’t take us on, we have a chance.”

—The website has a split personality: After numerous decision changes, it still uses the old ThisIsLondon.co.uk URL that is the hallmark of previous owner DMGT’s regional web network. Mullins says it chose a non-Standard URL originally out of fear: “There was a fear among all journalists: if you put content online, you canibalise sales of newspaper… Evening Standard wasn’t supportive of the idea, so it thought of leading with its entertainment portfolio, a dating site, the property listings. DMGT said ‘Let’s develop ThisIsLondon instead’. [But] when we reverted back to Standard.co.uk, you don’t want to lose the history of ThisIsLondon, even though the homepage is now a news page.”

Lebedev’s Standard website still links to other former DMGT stablemates - Mullins says these are reciprocal links for search engine optimisation. Still, there are other details that point to the company playing digital catch-up to M&A movements: the footer on Mullins’ e-mail still says that the opinions and views expressed may not reflect the views of DGMT’s Associated Newspapers Limited.