As The Independent's sales fall to a new low, will anyone take it on?

The Independent is a calling card across the world, the paper's former owner, Tony O'Reilly, once told me. It was one of the major reasons he fought so hard to acquire the Indy and why he was prepared to lose so much money afterwards as its publisher.He understood that it was the title that gave the paper much of its global cachet. It also accounted, at least in part, for its initial sales success in Britain.Even if the paper's claim to independence was somewhat suspect - independence from what? - it cannot be denied that it championed liberal journalism. And O'Reilly, who disagreed with some of the output, did not interfere editorially.Gradually, however, its losses forced him to institute a continual round of cutbacks. Along the way, there were editorial innovations overseen by editor Simon Kelner, such as the format switch from broadsheet to compact, the poster-style front pages and the adoption of the "viewspaper" editorial approach.O'Reilly's single most devastating decision was to misread the onset of the digital revolution, which led to a disastrous delay in creating a worthwhile website. Meanwhile, despite occasional moments when it defied the industry's overall downward circulation trend, sales fell away. By the time O'Reilly's cash-strapped company, Independent News & Media, sold the Independent to Alexander Lebedev in March 2010, the paper was selling 184,000 (which included 53,000 bulks).Rightly, Lebedev and his team could see that hopes of reversing that... Continue reading at 'The Guardian'

[ The Guardian | 2014-01-17 00:00:00 UTC ]
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