The Independent

• 1. Introduction

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  The Independent arrived on British newsstands on the 7th of October 1986, born from a shared conviction among three journalists that something different was possible. Andreas Whittam Smith, Stephen Glover, and Matthew Symonds had all worked at The Daily Telegraph before walking away near the end of Lord Hartwell's tenure. Their first edition carried an advertising slogan that doubled as a dare: "It is. Are you?"

  The paper entered a market in upheaval. Rupert Murdoch's battle with the print unions at Wapping had cracked open the economics of newspaper production, and suddenly there was room for new competition. The Independent placed itself squarely between established giants, pitching for centre-left readers who might otherwise have picked up The Guardian, and for serious readers who regarded The Times as the newspaper of record.

  Within three years, circulation climbed above 400,000. For a brief window, it looked like the gamble had paid off completely. What happened next, and why the paper's print edition would ultimately close on the 26th of March 2016, is a story of price wars, ownership changes, plagiarism scandals, and a fundamental rethinking of what a newspaper is actually for.

• 2. The Wapping Moment

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  Newspaper Publishing plc, the company Whittam Smith and his partners created to produce The Independent, had an unlikely benefactor in Rupert Murdoch. By defeating the print unions in the Wapping dispute, Murdoch had driven down production costs across the industry. The Independent attracted some of the journalists from Murdoch's own broadsheets who had refused to follow him to his new headquarters.

  Marcus Sieff became the first chairman of Newspaper Publishing, while Whittam Smith took editorial control of the paper. The founding design was no small matter either. The final broadsheet look was produced by Carroll, Dempsey and Thirkell, following a commission by Nicholas Garland, who had been dissatisfied with proposals from Raymond Hawkey and Michael McGuiness. Alexander Chancellor, reviewing those early designs, reportedly said: "I thought we were joining a serious paper." Michael Crozier, serving as Executive Editor for Design and Picture from pre-launch in 1986 through to 1994, implemented the first edition.

  The launch timing proved both a strength and a pressure. The opening years were genuinely competitive, with the paper's circulation topping 400,000 by 1989. The founders had always intended the paper's politics to sit at the centre of the British spectrum, drawing from The Times and The Daily Telegraph readership, but the paper quickly found itself more naturally positioned as a rival to The Guardian on the left.

• 3. Ownership and Financial Strain

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  By the early 1990s, The Independent was facing a sustained price-cutting assault from the Murdoch titles. The paper responded with an advertising campaign that went on the offensive, running spoofs of The Times and The Daily Telegraph's mastheads, replacing those papers' names with "The Rupert Murdoch" and "The Conrad Black", with The Independent printed below as the contrasting alternative. The campaign made the paper's editorial philosophy explicit: it was presenting itself as unbeholden to any proprietor.

  The financial strain, however, was real. Tony O'Reilly's media group and Mirror Group Newspapers had each bought a stake of roughly a third by mid-1994. By March 1995, a rights issue restructured Newspaper Publishing, splitting ownership between O'Reilly's Independent News and Media at 43%, Mirror Group Newspapers at 43%, and Prisa, the publisher of the Spanish paper El Pais, at 12%.

  Further refinancing followed in 1996, and editorial leadership changed hands repeatedly. Andrew Marr was appointed editor in 1996; O'Reilly bought out the remaining shares of the company for £30 million in 1998, also assuming the company's debt. Rosie Boycott briefly held the editor role before leaving in April 1998 to join the Daily Express. Marr departed in May 1998 and later became the BBC's political editor. Simon Kelner took over the editorship at a moment when circulation had fallen below 200,000. By mid-2004, the newspaper was losing £5 million per year, though a gradual improvement meant that by 2006 circulation had reached a nine-year high.

• 4. The Compact Revolution

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  From September 2003, The Independent began printing in both broadsheet and tabloid-sized versions simultaneously. The smaller format was deliberately called "compact" rather than tabloid, a word the paper associated with the more sensational style of British popular press. The aim was to signal a continuation of hard news focus, comparable to the tabloid-size edition of The Times.

  Before the format change, the paper's daily circulation had sat at around 217,500, the lowest of any major national British daily. By March 2004, that figure had climbed by 15% to approximately 250,000. The last weekday broadsheet was produced on the 14th of May 2004; the Saturday broadsheet had already been discontinued in January of that year. The Independent on Sunday printed its last simultaneous broadsheet on the 9th of October 2005.

  On the 12th of April 2005, the paper underwent a further redesign with what was described as a more European feel, drawing comparisons to France's Liberation. The work was carried out by a Barcelona-based design studio. Double-page feature articles became a fixture in the main news sections, and a new second section called "Extra" launched on the 25th of April 2006, drawing comparisons to The Guardian's "G2" and The Times's "Times2". By the 23rd of September 2008, the main paper was printing in full colour, and "Extra" had been replaced by an "Independent Life Supplement" built around different daily themes.

  Simon Kelner, who had overseen many of these transformations, was named "Editor of the Year" at the What the Papers Say awards in 2003, with judges citing his "often arresting and imaginative front-page designs". By 2008, as he stepped down from the role, he acknowledged the style might have run its course, saying it was possible to "overdo the formula".

• 5. The Lebedev Era

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  On the 25th of March 2010, Independent News and Media sold The Independent to a company owned by the family of Russian oligarch Alexander Lebedev. The purchase price was a nominal £1 fee, with a further £9.25 million to follow over the next ten months. The alternative had been closing both The Independent and The Independent on Sunday, an option estimated to cost £28 million and £40 million respectively due to long-term contractual obligations. Alexander's son Evgeny became chairman of the new company, with Alexander joining as a board director. The family had already bought a controlling stake in the London Evening Standard the previous year.

  Two weeks after the sale, editor Roger Alton resigned. The paper was relaunched with a new design on the 20th of April 2010, featuring smaller headlines and a new pullout section called "Viewspaper", which carried comment and feature articles.

  The Viewspaper name took on a pointed resonance given a remark British Prime Minister Tony Blair had made in a speech on the 12th of June 2007. Blair had noted that The Independent had originally been "started as an antidote to the idea of journalism as views not news", and declared that it had become "avowedly a viewspaper not merely a newspaper". The paper's founders had named it Independent to signal editorial freedom from proprietorial influence; Blair's observation was that the balance between news and commentary had shifted considerably.

• 6. The Johann Hari Affair

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  In July 2011, columnist Johann Hari was stripped of the Orwell Prize he had won in 2008 after allegations of plagiarism and inaccuracy, allegations Hari later admitted were founded. The fallout extended well beyond one journalist. In January 2012, editor Chris Blackhurst told the Leveson inquiry that the scandal had "severely damaged" the newspaper's reputation.

  Blackhurst nonetheless indicated at the inquiry that Hari would return as a columnist within "four to five weeks". Hari subsequently announced he would not return. The episode attracted external commentary that cut directly at the paper's editorial culture. Jonathan Foreman drew an unfavourable comparison with the American press's handling of comparable incidents, including the Jayson Blair case, which he noted had prompted 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 staff and that the internal inquiry was a "facesaving exercise".

  The affair sat awkwardly against The Independent's founding identity as a paper committed to straight reporting over proprietorial viewpoints. Whatever the precise internal dynamics, the paper's handling of the scandal became part of the public record when Blackhurst's testimony to the Leveson inquiry placed it there.

• 7. Going Digital

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  The Independent's original website launched in 1996. In March 2016, the paper closed its print edition entirely. The last printed edition came out on Saturday the 26th of March 2016. The Independent on Sunday had already published its final edition six days earlier, on the 20th of March.

  The transition to a purely digital operation brought structural changes. Production had already moved to Northcliffe House in Kensington High Street, the headquarters of Associated Newspapers, in November 2008, though editorial, management, and commercial operations of the two groups remained separate. The company launched Independent TV in 2020 to expand video journalism. In March 2023, Chief International Correspondent Bel Trew produced a feature-length documentary for the outlet titled The Body in the Woods, covering the Ukraine war.

  The ownership picture continued to evolve. In 2017, Sultan Muhammad Abuljadayel bought a 30% stake. Independent Arabia launched in October 2018, published under licence and owned and managed by Saudi Research and Media Group, a major publishing organisation with close ties to the Saudi royal family. In September 2020, The Independent launched Independent en Espanol, a wholly owned Spanish-language edition. In March 2024, The Independent took over BuzzFeed and HuffPost in the UK under a multi-year licensing deal, with the stated aim of becoming what it described as "Britain's biggest publisher network for gen Z and millennial audiences". In April 2026, The Independent agreed a partnership to take commercial and digital control of The Evening Standard, with The Evening Standard remaining a separate company.