A little more than a year after introducing its PDF edition Star PM, The Toronto Star is pulling the plug on the e-newspaper, E&P reports. The company says it ceased publication of the weekday 12-page PDF version to devote more resources to TheStar.com and its new mobile service.

In an email message, Fred Kuntz, the paper’s editor-in-chief, told paidContent.org StarPM had about 17,000 subscribers—the print edition claims 1.2 million daily readers and the site has an average of 2.6 million uniques per month. The download rate was about a third of that on a typical day, adding that he was not sure about the cumulative download rate over a typical week. He surmised that most subscribers downloaded on some, but not all, days of the week.

At its September 2006 launch, the Star claimed it was the first North American daily to do so, following the lead of European e-newspaper ventures such as The Guardian’s G24, the Financial Times’ FTpm and 24Horas from El Pais in Spain. Since then, a number of other dailies have given the concept a go, including the Chicago Sun-Times, which began offering a free afternoon download also called P.M. in April. 

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