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 trend were hopeless. So they pursued a twin strategy by launching a new sister title, i, and significantly upgrading the online offer. i, priced at just 20p, caught the imagination of thousands of young people who had not previously bothered to read a national paper. In December, as today's release of the ABC figures show, it sold an average of 292,000 copies a day (but that included 63,700 bulks). As for the Independent, it slipped to a new low of 67,266, bumped up by 16,500 bulks. In fact, the Indy sold just 43,224 newsstand copies at full cover price.
As I wrote yesterday, leaving aside the commercial realities, the small circulation is the paper's real problem. Can it justify its claim to be a national paper any longer? That said, the website's audience is improving. The i certainly does have a regular audience by selling 220,000 newsstand copies a day (more, before anyone points it out, than The Guardian). So there is a journalistic property that investors and/or bidders might consider a worthwhile punt. The problem for Lebedev is that his flagship itself is floundering. Can he, or the chairman of the Independent Print board, Andreas Whittam Smith, find someone willing to take it on when its prospects look so perilous?
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