The 15-year-old would be journalist yelling “Evening Extra – Read All About It (yes, really)from his evening newspaper pitch outside his hometown station, could not have envisaged a life without printed newspapers.
The newspaper I sold back then was one of the first to be swallowed up as three London evening newspapers gave us the Evening Standard, the sole survivor.
Today The Independent is on sale with a print edition for the last time before going digital-only. Its first edition was published during the Cold War.
It gave us thinking and campaigning journalism worthy of its name. It was not aligned to any political party or faction being genuinely independent both of proprietorial interference and party allegiance.
It won a reputation for the front page photograph that rivals wondered why they had missed, or not treated the photograph with the same reverence.
The Independent once sold 400,000 copies a day, dropping to 40,000 which of course meant a need for the publisher to act.
Going digital is just as brave as that original decision by the founders to start up The Independent as it means it will go head to head with The Huffington Post, BuzzFeed and others which were designed to operate digitally.
The digital space is increasingly scrappy right now, witness the decision of The Sun to make a U-turn in October and scrap its paywall to offer most of its website content for free in order to better compete with Mail Online and BBC online.
Times change. But as a former newsman, I instinctively want print editions to continue.
I have always felt that publishers needed to do more with a younger audience to educate them in the daily habit of buying a daily paper instead of turning on their digital device.
The death of The Independent print version will be studied carefully by the great newspapers of the world which remain in print.
This reader, at least, is rooting for you to succeed!
Recent Comments