I really want to get into him more

I really want to get into him more."Arena: 'No Direction Home - Bob Dylan' is on BBC 2 at 9pm tomorrow and on Tuesday. It wasn't a fully-fledged relaunch - these days, you have to change the very size of your newspaper if you want to do one of those - but it was nonetheless a significant development. Last week, rather modestly, London's Evening Standard unveiled a "fresh new look" with a stack of new columnists and a boosted business section. A signal was going out to the world: in a world of dumbing down, we are doing a bit of wising-up. Heralding the arrival of 20 new writers, the paper will henceforth provide a platform for "a new generation of writing talent", it announced.

In come Jonathan Freedland, Johann Hari, Joanna Coles and Simon Singh as weekly columnists and, on the City pages, grand old names such as Neil Collins and Christopher Fildes. The paper will "deliver every shade of opinion on all the subjects that matter to all those living and working in London". Or, put more bluntly: the paper has been kicked upmarket. Not miles upmarket, but an inch or two closer to its traditional position from where it used to peer down at its populist rival The Evening News, which it went on to swallow up nearly 20 years ago You might not notice the change at first The front page looks no different. Things only become apparent once you reach a dozen pages inside, where there is now a smart, text-heavy comment spread, carrying four columns and the paper's leader. Arguably, this spread would not look out of place in the pages of today's compact Times or Independent. Further in, the business section is bigger, and no longer on pink paper, a decision that will delight the Financial Times which sued unsuccessfully when the Standard originally went that colour. It also gives the Standard's editor Veronica Wadley much greater flexibility to move pages around The Evening Standard cannot be the paper it once was And it is no longer trying to be.

For years the Standard was a shameless flirt, appealing to everyone No longer. Talk to senior figures within Associated Newspapers, publisher of the Standard, and they tell you those days are over. The sorts of people who used to buy a red-top in the morning and a Standard in the evening are increasingly spurning paid-for newspapers. That is why Associated launched the give-away Standard Lite - a bright and breezy, slimmed-down version of the paper, last December. It is also why now, a few months on, Associated is moving on to stage two of its strategy: to con-solidate the main title's upmarket readership. Sources at the paper candidly admit that the Standard can no longer be " all things to all people" Sales are down 90,000 infive years. Evening papers everywhere are selling much less well than they used to So something had to be done.

The Lite was brought out reluctantly, as a defensive measure against the likes of News International and Richard Desmond's Express group, who may still yet bring out their own evening freebies Lite is there to mop up the bottom end of the market. The main paper is focused a little more on the top end, which is where advertisers like it. It was always the plan to beef up the intellect of the main title once Lite had established itself, I am told. Last week the paper was boosted further with the return of veteran Bert Hardy - the paper's MD two decades ago and a champion of old-fashioned journalism in old-fashioned, paid-for papers The paper has tried ad hoc methods to prop up circulation. such as bunging a free CD on the front page, but found that these are not financially sustainable and also rarely holds on to readers once the freebies end.