Redesign at The Indy can't hide financial worries

Roy Greenslade
24 Sep 2008

To quote from its understandably immodest blurb, The Independent opened a bright new chapter in its history yesterday with a full-colour revamp that was, well, colourful.

Not as colourful as the language of its editor, Roger Alton, but just as entertaining and as straightforward as the man himself.

First, the good news. He has added pace to the main paper without threatening the overall sense of seriousness. Despite the plethora of colour, its use was generally restrained and not the least intrusive.

The configuration was logical. The comment pages looked much more reader-friendly than before. Though the back of the book — that is, after the centre pages — was much as before, using the weather page as a breaker before business avoided the previous problem of opening it with a spread.

As for the revised supplement, renamed Independent Life (from Extra), Alton dared to adopt a magazine approach, with artistic white space, headlines in colour and odd dashes of design trickery.

It did clash somewhat with the main section but the point, of course, was to complement it. Placing the games and puzzles on the back, imitating The Times's T2, was also a sensible move, as was the TV guide layout (though the small type may annoy some readers). So far, so good.

Now for the bad news. There was still too little to read compared with the Indy's rivals. Its domestic news quota was lower than that of the other three, but foreign news was particularly squeezed. The Indy carried 10 separate stories, against 14 in the Daily Telegraph and 15 in The Guardian. The Times also had 10, but over a greater area.

The centre pages, though given a World tag, were devoted to a feature that would have made much more sense in the Life section. Indeed, that centre slot, a problem for serious compact-sized papers, is going to need a lot of thought in coming days.

The Pandora gossip page, a column with an eclectic agenda that never seems to know its audience, looked as if it was heading towards red-top territory.

Overall, however, the Indy remains what it has been for many a year, a paper that is both insufficiently idiosyncratic and too ideologically bland to attract a large audience.

It has one or two interesting writers and reporters, so there will always be reasons to read the occasional article. Indeed, yesterday's splash on the methane gas escaping from the Arctic was a case in point, though I seem to recall an American science website coming up with a similar revelation in October last year.

What the Independent cannot do any longer is punch above its weight. It has lost the capability to surprise us. Alton, a journalist's journalist, cannot be blamed for the fact that he has taken on a poisoned chalice.

His single major decision, to end the daily poster front pages, was sensible enough in some ways. It had become an overused device. On the other hand, its departure removed the Indy's unique selling point. It was a no-win situation.

One extraordinarily bizarre decision was to implement a 25% cover price increase the week before launching a revamped paper. Surely it would have been wiser to have done both together? Which takes us to the really bad news about the Independent.

Its sale is falling like a stone. In August, it sold only 128,800 copies in the UK at its then full price of 80p. Given the sackful of complaints it has received about its rise to £1, I would very much doubt that it will achieve even that modest total this month.

Last month's "headline" circulation figure, of 230,000, includes 41,500 bulk sales and a mind-boggling 46,500 foreign sales (greater than those of the Telegraph, Times and Guardian, all of which outsell the paper in Britain).

Until the official auditor, ABC, gets to grips with the oddity of certain reported sales from abroad, we must accept that these are real paid-for sales. Even if genuine, they do not help the Indy attract advertising in Britain. That is the paper's real Achilles heel. For most of its 22-year existence, it has piled up annual financial losses.

As I once heard an editor of the ill-fated European say: "We have a newspaper. We don't have a business."

But the Indy's owner, Tony O'Reilly's Irish-based media conglomerate, Independent News & Media, has accepted the state of affairs, happily underwriting the losses with profits made elsewhere in its empire. There is nothing wrong with that - although rebel investor Denis O'Brien, who has built up a significant minority stake in INM, has vehemently and publicly disagreed with O'Reilly on that issue.

Nonetheless in these straitened times for newspapers, if owners are willing to publish loss-making papers in order to maintain a plurality of voices in the market place, we should applaud them.

But that begs another, more crucial question: what does The Independent offer us that its three major rivals do not?

There are writers we might miss, though in the event of the paper's demise the best of them would get picked up elsewhere.

Meanwhile, the Indy has failed to prepare adequately for an online future. Its website, which improved considerably in a January revamp, is second rate compared with rival offerings. It therefore has far fewer users than them.

So a colourful paper, even done well as it has been, will not stop the rot. At £1, a marginal paper is about to become even more marginalised.