My way to save Indy - kill off print edition and focus on going digital

Roy Greenslade
26 Nov 2008

The Independent has taken risks in the past. Now, surely, it's time for the paper's owners to make the most revolutionary leap of all. It should stop publishing its newsprint editions and go entirely online. Here's the logic. The paper is costing Independent News & Media (INM), the Dublin-based company run by Tony O'Reilly and his son, Gavin, a small fortune every year. At last count, it was not too far short of £12 million.

They are finding it more and more difficult to sell the paper's newsprint issues. The latest official circulation audit shows that the Indy they profess to love, managed to sell 201,000 copies a day last month, and only 119,000 of them were bought at the full price. The increase to a cover price of £1 has hit sales so badly that the new editor, Roger Alton, has seen fit to go public by attacking the decision.

He believes that in this "very, very inhospitable time for newspapers" many titles are in trouble and none more so than The Independent. "We're in a more vulnerable position because we're smaller," he said.

That's the negative story, of course. Now for the positive. Despite INM's initial reluctance to acknowledge the growing potential of internet news outlets and its misguided attempt at first to charge users, The Independent website is not doing too badly at all nowadays. It is certainly growing its audience rapidly, having registered 8,408,910 unique users in September, an increase of 93% compared with the same month last year.

It is not up there with the big boys, with 20 million-plus users enjoyed by some rivals, but - given the size of Indy's newsprint audience - it is a reasonably healthy state of affairs. The Indy also has had an enviable track record as a newspaper pioneer throughout its relatively short 22-year lifespan. It is credited with having "invented" bumper Saturday editions. It came up with a superb new style magazine. Most innovative of all, it piloted the switch from broadsheet to compact that led to two national rivals changing shape and stimulated a worldwide move towards the smaller format.

Now, though, comes a real chance to lead the digital revolution towards its next, inevitable phase. INM must scrap printing in favour of uploading. It will save trees, save ink, wipe out all production costs and eliminate the expense of distribution. It will enable INM to prune its marketing budget. In so doing, the paper will take a giant step into the digital age.

I rather fancy the O'Reillys will greet this idea with thin smiles and a shaking of heads before pointing out how naïve I must be. After all, I know they have toyed with the idea, and that they did some interesting sums to show how unfeasible it would be to take such a step.

On the basis of those calculations, they decided it would be ruinous financially (worse by far than the already parlous current situation). It convinced them that to pull out of print now would sacrifice far too much advertising revenue. The losses would be colossal. Even if they were to make all the savings I listed above, INM would still lose out by a wide margin. Even if it were to save a further £5 million, say, on editorial and, possibly, another £5 million on marketing, the gap between print revenue and online-only revenue would be as large as £30 million a year. Well, in year one at least. I know INM is expecting to increase its website income by 10% in the coming year, but it's from such a small base that, in real terms, the amount is negligible.

So, as I say, I imagine the O'Reillys both wondering - and not for the first time - if this media commentator has lost his marbles. But I sincerely believe their ailing newsprint paper is in danger of attracting so few readers in the coming year that the balance of those sums is likely to change for the worse. So they need to plan now for an online future and to reap the rewards of being the first major paper in the world to boldly go where no man has gone before.

That Star Trek reference could not be more apt because they are in a position to explore the final newspaper frontier, the one highlighted to an extent by none other than Rupert Murdoch in his speeches in Australia last week. Though he was stressing that newspapers do have a future (though I tend to think he means his own newspapers rather than other people's) he also made it clear that news brands are the future.

And INM cannot be other than aware that it has a distinctive brand in The Independent. Right from the outset, it was a name alone that caught the imagination and it remains, on a global scale, a saleable, marketable commodity.

One further thing before the company's executives look once more at their figures and wonder whether to take the leap. Advertising will eventually have to come to the net.

I know that sites with huge audiences, such as YouTube, still get a tiny income from ads. But the moment cannot be too far away when advertisers chase the eyeballs. For the moment I accept that multi-platform journalism is the best, and most financially prudent way of distributing content. For how long though?

Go on, Tony. Go for it, Gavin. You could lead newspapers to the promised land.