End of a dream - The Independent was a bold project but from the beginning it carried the seeds of its own decline
There has been much philosophising about the impending closure of the Independent’s print edition. I myself have joined in. The internet has killed off the paper. There is no alternative to an online-only edition. What is the point of a publication selling only 40,000 copies a day and inexorably losing circulation?
All true, but these calm reflections evade the central question. Why are the Independent and its Sunday sister going to the wall? Was it inevitable? Was there an act, or series of acts, which sent these once distinguished (and even now still doughty) titles to their doom? As a co-founder of both papers I may be the last person in the world to answer these questions authoritatively, but I shall try.
Let me go back thirty years to the launch of the Independent. Our great boast was that it would be free from proprietorial interference, free from Rupert Murdoch and Robert Maxwell. It would not be beholden to any political party or lobby group or vested interest. My God, it was a powerful cry. It moves me even now. But it was naïve and unworldly too. Beautiful and inspired though the early editions were – young people in the street would carry the paper so that it could be seen, and mark them out – they had within themselves the seeds of their own decline.
All newspapers make mistakes, and the Independent was no exception. It failed to build up classified advertising as it should and could have, losing out on millions of pounds of revenue. The Independent on Sunday was launched into a recession. The founders began squabbling among themselves for no good reason. There was a degree of hubris, culminating in an attempt, thwarted at the eleventh hour, to buy the Observer, kill off the title and merge it with the Independent on Sunday. Perhaps I might be allowed to say that by this point I had departed.
And then came the external blows, the greatest by far of which was Rupert Murdoch’s ruthless decision in 1993 to cut the cover price of the Times (then selling roughly the same number of copies as the Independent) from 45p to 30p and finally to 20p. The Independent’s circulation collapsed, as Murdoch had intended, and never recovered. This was the most decisive event in the life of the newspaper. Lacking a proprietor or publishing company with deep pockets, the Independent was unable to take on Murdoch in a fight.
Meanwhile, something else was going on. At the time of the 1987 election the Independent’s readers were divided almost equally between Tory, Labour and SDP voters. This was a remarkable achievement. The paper really was politically non-aligned. But not long after its launch it began to drift Leftwards so that it eventually ended up occupying much the same intellectual space as the Guardian. Some 20 journalists from the Times had joined the Independent before its launch because they could not bear to work at union-free Wapping, which suggests that many of them were of the Left. Their presence at least partly explains the political trajectory of the paper. There was no proprietor to question the commercial sense of vacating the ground which the Independent had successfully carved out for itself, no one to challenge the wisdom of squaring up to the formidable Guardian on its much narrower strip of land.
The paper, and its Sunday sibling after 1990, would have been in a stronger position to deal with external shocks, and to avoid self-inflicted wounds, if there had been someone standing above and beyond the founders – a tough (and rich) newspaper proprietor. As it was, there was a weak and pliant board, most of whose non-executive members knew little about newspapers. The Independent would never have been born without the vision of Andreas Whittam Smith, but as the paper’s editor and the company’s chief executive, he enjoyed few checks on his power. Like the rest of us, he needed a guide.
When the papers finally acquired a proprietor in 1994, they were first burdened with David Montgomery and Mirror Group Newspapers, a most ill-suited match, before finding a kind of home with Tony O’Reilly the following year. I recently praised Mr O’Reilly in this column, and I don’t retract a word. He was a most indulgent and generous proprietor who lavished tens of millions on the two titles. Yet I see him as a highly successful businessman who owned newspapers rather than a passionate newspaperman with a profound understanding of his titles in the mould of Northcliffe, Beaverbrook or Murdoch.
And now we have a proprietor in young, earnest Evgeny Lebedev, who tells us Fleet Street is in denial about the decline of print and the inevitable triumph of online. He may be right. A digital Independent could thrive. (Its Sunday sister is effectively buried.) I would like to think that the paper is at last in the sympathetic hands of a proprietor in tune with its ancestral voices, but it’s not altogether easy to believe that Mr Lebedev is that man.
