They banged themselves out
March 26, 2016 12:15 PM   Subscribe

The Independent Newspaper goes out of print on a scoop.
As its final print run goes to press, the paper’s longest-serving editor recalls the highs and lows of its 30-year life – including his ‘proudest moment’ when it was attacked by Tony Blair – and ponders the future of a beleaguered industry.
From the inside
posted by adamvasco (19 comments total) 8 users marked this as a favorite
 
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My dad often used to write obits for the Independent, before he ended up on that page himself. Today "obits for the Independent" has an entirely different meaning. It's sad to lose the one UK national paper which seriously tried to be unbiased.
posted by w0mbat at 12:25 PM on March 26, 2016 [14 favorites]


the one UK national paper which seriously tried to be unbiased

After Lebedev used the Independent to attack Labour's policy on non-doms in the 2015 election, I ceased thinking that the paper was much different from the rest of the English press. Let us hope this is the first newspaper obituary of many.
posted by Emma May Smith at 12:35 PM on March 26, 2016 [3 favorites]


Fuck...
posted by Artw at 1:13 PM on March 26, 2016


Two things put the Independent out of business. The first was Rupert Murdoch's predatory pricing, which squeezed the Independent out of the market. The second was the Indie's own disastrous decision to turn itself into a 'viewspaper' -- famously satirised in The Thick of It:
"Just tell me what the fucking news is and I'll put it on the front page. It's not like we're the Independent. We can't just stick a headline saying CRUELTY then stick a picture of a dolphin or a whale underneath it."
The Indie was often very silly, but I'll miss it, and I don't know how long it'll survive as a digital-only publication.

Let us hope this is the first newspaper obituary of many.

Be careful what you wish for. The Guardian is haemorrhaging money, and with the Independent gone, the Guardian is the only left-of-centre broadsheet left.
posted by verstegan at 2:12 PM on March 26, 2016 [12 favorites]


Be careful what you wish for. The Guardian is haemorrhaging money, and with the Independent gone, the Guardian is the only left-of-centre broadsheet left.

I know what I'm wishing for. The Guardian is not immune to criticism.
posted by Emma May Smith at 2:28 PM on March 26, 2016 [2 favorites]


> I know what I'm wishing for.

You're wishing for a lot of people to lose their jobs, but I guess ideological purity is more important.
posted by languagehat at 3:13 PM on March 26, 2016 [23 favorites]


At the end of the day, the only life to survive will be cockroaches and Rupert Murdoch.
posted by acb at 4:24 PM on March 26, 2016 [1 favorite]


Oh, and

.
posted by acb at 4:24 PM on March 26, 2016 [1 favorite]


About 73 min into this Jaccob Appelbaum really eviscerates the Guardian, Emma May Smith.
posted by jeffburdges at 5:00 PM on March 26, 2016


Two things put the Independent out of business.

The Independent isn't out of business, though. Just the print version. In 2016 it doesn't make much sense to carry the overhead of a printing press. Unless I've missed something the (hit and miss, in terms of quality) online version will carry on.

The Guardian may be haemorrhaging money, but it still has its trust (and therefore recurring operational funding) and will get itself sorted out in the next few years.

Not everything is doom and gloom all the time.
posted by My Dad at 5:22 PM on March 26, 2016 [1 favorite]


I went out and bought a copy today (sold out in the Co-op downstairs, unless I was looking in the wrong place. Bought the last copy in the newsagents opposite whose raison d'être is selling 9% lager or cider to alcoholics.)

I tried to read it. I read the first issue, earnestly, and (painful for my mum) I nonchalantly read that day's issue on return from my first day in secondary school, playing it cool about the big change in my (& my family's) life. But today, 26.5 years later, I had a little box in my hand, and if I wanted something to read, it had something to read in it for me. And I read a few thousand sentences of what other people had to say, and a few thousand read sentences I wrote today, and, red letter narcissism day, 12,000 people read an offhand reply I wrote saying which airline precisely had been racist. I've not read anything on the newsprint. I just seem not to do that any more.

I hope that The Guardian stays alive. It's doing some good things, and I'd like to spend some money on it, but I don't really know how at the minute. I don't really engage with it that much, even though I guess I should, and a lot of what it does is underrewarded.

What I guess my conclusion is is that times are unpredictable. In ten years time, who knows how we'll read news, and who'll get paid for it. I'm not even reading the same way I read this time last year, and I doubt I'll be using the same filters I do now this time next year. Hopefully I'll be helping smart, kind people say how things work, because that's what I want to do.
posted by ambrosen at 5:50 PM on March 26, 2016 [1 favorite]


You're wishing for a lot of people to lose their jobs, but I guess ideological purity is more important.
posted by languagehat

My heart bleeds for all those poor, very well paid middle and upper class people who won't have cushy jobs at the grauniad any more, while there has been over a million of my people on the dole, a level that hasn't gone down for twenty years now. It's fuck all to do with ideological purity.

Also the graun is full of advertorial, and doesn't speak to the people in the way it did in the olden days, it is full of propaganda for, for e.g. staying in the Euro.

It will be out of business soon, as, per Private-Eye, they are shooting through the money they made from selling the trader part, and soon it will be gone. They don't speak for the left or the people at all these days.
posted by marienbad at 6:18 PM on March 26, 2016


full of propaganda for, for e.g. staying in the Euro.

If you'd actually read the G, or in fact any newspaper, you'd known that the UK isn't in the Euro. You opted out in 1992.
posted by effbot at 7:10 PM on March 26, 2016 [6 favorites]


Euro meaning the union in this instance. I find it unlikely that marienbad is unaware of the currency they daily use.
posted by longbaugh at 7:57 PM on March 26, 2016 [3 favorites]


There's still The I (though it's being bought out so who knows there)

In the past I've gone through long stretches of buying a paper every day (and I bought the Saturday Guardian every week for years) but now I literally can't remember the last time I bought a physical paper. The only time I read one is when I'm having my hair cut.

I think it's inevitable that more papers are going to go web only - esp non Murdoch ones (that massage their circulation figures with giving them away free to hotel chains etc). Would be nice if the Indie* would have a bit less click-bate editorial (goes double for the Grauniad) mind.

*Or Indescriably Boring as the Eye puts it
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 2:44 AM on March 27, 2016


How anyone can bear such enmity for the poor old Guardian, I don't know. All my hate is utterly used up on the Mail. I buy up as much hate as I can, both in bulk at the supermarket and special, more powerful artisinal hand-crafted hate at the farmers' market, but it's still not enough. None to spare for anything else. Sorry.

I'll tell my journo friends on the Graun that they're bloated classist overpaid ideologues pushing propaganda on the masses for cynical reasons, and have no right to jobs while millions are unemployed. They enjoy irony.

FWIW, the received opinion among the scribbling classes at the time was that the Indy got holed below the waterline when Witless got a bee in his bonnet about launching the Sindy, which was overambitious and under-resourced and dragged the whole lot down.
posted by Devonian at 5:17 AM on March 27, 2016 [6 favorites]


The Indie never really recovered from the massive losses incurred by launching the Sunday paper at the bottom of the early-nineties recession. The paper was always underfunded, but made its competitors look stodgy through better design (particularly photography in the Saturday magazine, which it pioneered) and broader cultural coverage. It's mundane now to take pop music seriously, but it was so cursorily and patronisingly done before the Independent started including a whole page on Thursdays entitled 'Rock', startlingly in the same letterhead as 'Art', 'Politics' or any other section.

The Guardian took on quite a few refugee writers from the Indie once it lost its independence and started its slow slide to where we are now, but they never seemed quite at home there. Too independent, I guess, whereas the Guardian has always been an establishment paper at heart, like the Times was before Murdoch.
posted by GeorgeBickham at 5:31 AM on March 27, 2016 [1 favorite]


How anyone can bear such enmity for the poor old Guardian, I don't know.

The Guardian really ought to just report facts and opinions I agree with. If they don't they are bad and all the journalists deserve to be laid off, etc.
posted by My Dad at 9:25 AM on March 27, 2016 [3 favorites]


If I recall, ioerror does not criticizes the Guardian's own reporting that much, maybe he says they bias stories to retain access or something. Instead, he attacks their poor source protection, security incompetence, destruction of leaked documents, and obstruction of use of leaked documents by ProPublica, but primarily their efforts to deny independent journalists the cultural and legal protections afforded to journalists. It's statements made at a journalism conference in Germany, so it's a warning to other journalists about working with the Guardian.
posted by jeffburdges at 10:28 AM on March 27, 2016


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