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The Independent is a British online newspaper. It was established in 1986 as a national morning printed paper. Nicknamed the Indy, it began as a broadsheet and changed to tabloid format in 2003. The last printed edition was published on Saturday 26 March 2016, leaving only the online edition.
The daily edition was named National Newspaper of the Year at the 2004 British Press Awards. The Independent won the Brand of the Year Award in The Drum Awards for Online Media 2023.
The paper was created at a time of a fundamental change in British newspaper publishing. Rupert Murdoch was challenging long-accepted practices of the print unions and ultimately defeated them in the Wapping dispute. Consequently, production costs could be reduced which created openings for more competition. As a result of controversy around Murdoch's move to Wapping, the plant was effectively having to function under siege from sacked print workers picketing outside. The Independent attracted some of the staff from the two Murdoch broadsheets who had chosen not to move to his company's new headquarters. Launched with the advertising slogan "It is. Are you?", and challenging both The Guardian for centre-left readers and The Times as the newspaper of record, The Independent reached a circulation of more than 400,000 by 1989.
Competing in a moribund market, The Independent sparked a general freshening of newspaper design as well as, within a few years, a price war in the market sector.
In the 1990s, The Independent was faced with price cutting by the Murdoch titles, and started an advertising campaign accusing The Times and The Daily Telegraph of reflecting the views of their proprietors, Rupert Murdoch and Conrad Black. It featured spoofs of the other papers' mastheads with the words The Rupert Murdoch or The Conrad Black, with The Independent below the main title.
had financial problems. A number of other media companies were interested in the paper. Tony O'Reilly's media group and [[Mirror Group Newspapers|Trinity Mirror]] (MGN) had bought a stake of about a third each by mid-1994. In March 1995, Newspaper Publishing was restructured with a rights issue, splitting the shareholding into O'Reilly's Independent News & Media (43%), [[MGN|Trinity Mirror]] (43%), and [[Prisa|PRISA]] (publisher of El País) (12%).
In April 1996, there was another refinancing, and in March 1998, O'Reilly bought the other shares of the company for £30 million, and assumed the company's debt. Brendan Hopkins headed Independent News, Andrew Marr was appointed editor of The Independent, and Rosie Boycott became editor of The Independent on Sunday. Marr introduced a dramatic if short-lived redesign which won critical favour but was a commercial failure, partly as a result of a limited promotional budget. Marr admitted his changes had been a mistake in his book, My Trade.
Boycott left in April 1998 to join the Daily Express, and Marr left in May 1998, later becoming the BBC's political editor. Simon Kelner was appointed as the editor. By this time, the circulation had fallen below 200,000. Independent News spent heavily to increase circulation, and the paper went through several redesigns. While circulation increased, it did not approach the level which had been achieved in 1989, or restore profitability. Job cuts and financial controls reduced the morale of journalists and the quality of the product.
In November 2008, following further staff cuts, production was moved to Northcliffe House, in Kensington High Street, the headquarters of Associated Newspapers. The two newspaper groups' editorial, management and commercial operations remained separate, but they shared services including security, information technology, switchboard and payroll.
In July 2011, The Independents columnist Johann Hari was stripped of the Orwell Prize he had won in 2008 after claims, to which Hari later admitted, of plagiarism and inaccuracy. In January 2012, Chris Blackhurst, editor of The Independent, told the Leveson inquiry that the scandal had "severely damaged" the newspaper's reputation. He nevertheless told the inquiry that Hari would return as a columnist in "four to five weeks". Hari later announced that he would not return to The Independent. Jonathan Foreman contrasted The Independents reaction to the scandal unfavorably with the reaction of American newspapers to similar incidents such as the Jayson Blair case, which led to resignations of editors, "deep soul-searching", and "new standards of exactitude being imposed". The historian Guy Walters suggested that Hari's fabrications had been an open secret among the newspaper's staff and that their internal inquiry was a "facesaving exercise".
The Independent and The Independent on Sunday endorsed "Remain" in the Brexit referendum of 2016.
In March 2016, The Independent closed its print edition to become a pure play digital media company. The last printed edition was published on Saturday 26 March 2016. The Independent on Sunday published its last edition on 20 March 2016 and was closed.
In 2017, Sultan Muhammad Abuljadayel bought a 30% stake in The Independent.
Later that year, Chief Executive of IDNML Zach Leonard moved to the United States as Global COO and President (North America), and former Editor Christian Broughton was appointed Chief Executive. Louise Thomas was appointed US Editor in March 2024.
From September 2003, the paper was produced in both broadsheet and tabloid-sized versions, with the same content in each. The tabloid edition was termed "compact" to distance itself from the more sensationalist reporting style usually associated with "tabloid" newspapers in the UK, preferring to remain focused on hard news (similarly to the tabloid-size edition of The Times.)Hughes, Gary: "A History of the Tabloid Newspaper," updated 14 December 2021, Historic Newspapers, retrieved 22 May 2024 After launching in the London and then in North West England, the smaller format appeared gradually throughout the UK. Soon afterwards, Rupert Murdoch's Times followed suit, introducing its own tabloid-sized version. Prior to these changes, The Independent had a daily circulation of around 217,500, the lowest of any major national British daily, a figure that climbed by 15% as of March 2004 (to 250,000). Throughout much of 2006, circulation stagnated at a quarter of a million. On 14 May 2004, The Independent produced its last weekday broadsheet, having stopped producing a Saturday broadsheet edition in January. The Independent on Sunday published its last simultaneous broadsheet on 9 October 2005, and thereafter followed a compact design until the print edition was discontinued.
On 12 April 2005, The Independent redesigned its layout to a more European feel, similar to France's Libération. The redesign was carried out by a Barcelona-based design studio. The weekday second section was subsumed within the main paper, double-page feature articles became common in the main news sections, and there were revisions to the front and back covers. A new second section, "Extra", was introduced on 25 April 2006. It is similar to The Guardians "G2" and The Timess "Times2", containing features, reportage and games, including sudoku. In June 2007, The Independent on Sunday consolidated its content into a news section which included sports and business, and a magazine focusing on life and culture. On 23 September 2008, the main newspaper became full-color, and "Extra" was replaced by an "Independent Life Supplement" focusing on different themes each day.
Three weeks after the acquisition of the paper by Alexander Lebedev and Evgeny Lebedev in 2010, the paper was relaunched with another redesign on 20 April. The new format featured smaller headlines and a new pullout "Viewspaper" section, which contained the paper's comment and feature articles.
Under the subsequent editorship of Chris Blackhurst, the campaigning, poster-style front pages were scaled back in favour of more conventional news stories.
Daily (Monday to Friday) The Independent:
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On 23 January 2008, The Independent relaunched its online edition. "Welcome to The Independent's new website". The Independent. 23 January 2008. The relaunched site introduced a new look, better access to the blog service, priority on image and video content, and additional areas of the site including art, architecture, fashion, gadgets and health. The paper launched podcast programmes such as "The Independent Music Radio Show", "The Independent Travel Guides", "The Independent Sailing Podcasts", and "The Independent Video Travel Guides".
From 2009, the website started carrying short video news bulletins provided by the Al Jazeera English news channel. Over the years this developed to the point that the website regularly featured video content in its news reports. Some of this was syndicated and sourced from other news channels and providers, but The Independent gradually increased numbers in its own video team. In addition to putting together short-form video news reports, the website soon began producing its own video and podcast series, including explainers, short documentary ‘on the ground' style reports, and lifestyle and culture videos, including since 2017 the award-nominated series Millennial Love, later rebranded Love Lives.
In 2014, The Independent launched a sister website, i100, a "shareable" journalism site with similarities to Reddit and Upworthy. It was rebranded in 2016 as Indy100.
In late 2020 The Independent launched Independent TV, which saw the title's video offering provided on many formats including on the web browser, in the app, and on Smart TV.
In March 2023 The Independent released The Body in the Woods, a feature-length documentary by its Chief International Correspondent, Bel Trew.
The paper has highlighted what it refers to as being committed by pro-government forces in the Darfur region of Sudan.
The paper has been a strong supporter of electoral reform. In 1997, The Independent on Sunday launched a campaign for the decriminalisation of cannabis. Ten years later, it reversed itself, arguing that skunk, the cannabis strain "smoked by the majority of young Britons" in 2007, had become "25 times stronger than hashish sold a decade ago".
The paper's opinion on the British monarchy has sometimes been described as republican, though it officially identifies as reformist, wishing for a reformed monarchy that "reflects the nation over which it reigns and which is accountable to the people for its activities". Originally, it avoided royal stories, Whittam Smith later saying he thought the British press was "unduly besotted" with the Royal Family and that a newspaper could "manage without" stories about the monarchy.
In 2007, Alan Rusbridger, editor of The Guardian, said of The Independent: "The emphasis on views, not news, means that the reporting is rather thin, and it loses impact on the front page the more you do that". In a 12 June 2007 speech, British Prime Minister Tony Blair called The Independent a "viewspaper", saying it "was started as an antidote to the idea of journalism as views not news. That was why it was called the Independent. Today it is avowedly a viewspaper not merely a newspaper". The Independent criticised Blair's comments the following day;Grice, Andrew (13 June 2007). " Blair's attack provokes anger among newspaper editors and broadcasters". The Independent (London). Retrieved 9 December 2009. it later changed format to include a "Viewspaper" insert in the centre of the regular newspaper, designed to feature most of the opinion columns and arts reviews.
A leader published on the day of the 2008 London mayoral election compared the candidates and said that, if the newspaper had a vote, it would vote first for the Green Party candidate, Siân Berry, noting the similarity between her priorities and those of The Independent, and secondly, with "rather heavy heart", for the incumbent, Ken Livingstone.
An Ipsos MORI poll estimated that in the 2010 United Kingdom general election, 44% of regular readers voted Liberal Democrat, 32% voted Labour, and 14% voted Conservative, compared to 23%, 29%, and 36%, respectively, of the overall electorate. On the eve of the 2010 general election, The Independent supported the Liberal Democrats, arguing that "they are longstanding and convincing champions of civil liberties, sound economics, international co-operation on the great global challenges and, of course, fundamental electoral reform. These are all principles that this newspaper has long held dear." However, before the 2015 United Kingdom general election, The Independent on Sunday desisted from advising its readers how to vote, writing that "this does not mean that we are a bloodless, value-free news-sheet. We have always been committed to social justice", but the paper recognised that it was up the readers to "make up their own mind about whether you agree with us or not". Rather than support a particular party, the paper urged all its reader to vote as "a responsibility of common citizenship". On 4 May 2015, the weekday version of The Independent said that a continuation of the Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition after the general election would be a positive outcome.
At the end of July 2018, The Independent led a campaign they called the "Final Say", a change.org petition by former editor Christian Broughton, for a binding referendum on the Brexit deal between the UK and the European Union.
As of October 2018, Independent Arabia was launched. It is published under licence, and owned and managed by Saudi Research and Media Group (SRMG), a major publishing organisation with close ties to the Saudi royal family.
In the 2024 United Kingdom general election, The Independent endorsed the Labour Party, although added what it termed as a warning that: “Labour must turn its promises into policies that benefit the hardworking and hopeful people of this country”.
The Independent:
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There have also been various guest editors over the years, such as Elton John on 1 December 2010, The Body Shop's Anita Roddick on 19 June 2003 and U2's Bono in 2006.
A September 2006 edition of The (RED) Independent, designed by fashion designer Giorgio Armani, drew controversy due to its cover shot, showing model Kate Moss in blackface for an article about AIDS in Africa.
In January 2013, The Independent was nominated for the Responsible Media of the Year award at the British Muslim Awards.
The Independent journalists have won a range of British Press Awards, including:
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