The Independent and Independent on Sunday newspapers are to cease print editions in March, leaving only an online edition, the owner has said. The owner said: “This decision preserves the Independent brand and allows us to continue to invest in the high-quality editorial content that is attracting more and more readers to our online platforms.”
The Independent was set up in 1986.The last print edition of the Independent will be published on Saturday 26 March, while the last Independent on Sunday will be on 20 March.
At its peak sales hit around 428,000 copies a day. Twenty-five years later, the number of copies being sold on a weekday in newsagents is rather closer to 28,000.
This is an announcement that has been long awaited. The problem about switching to digital is that the big British print newspapers bring in revenues in hundreds of millions of pounds while even the best digital products make only tens of millions.
The long decline in print readership has led to many declarations that print will be dead in a few years’ time, but until a way is found to make more money out of digital, they will hang on to their print readers to the very end.
Stephen Glover, a co-founder of the Independent, said the paper was selling “so few copies that it doesn’t really make sense to go on printing it every day”.
Mr Glover said there was a “longer question” about whether online-only papers could support the same number of journalists and do the “same sort of journalism” as printed ones.
The Times’ media editor Beth Rigby said the industry had been in turmoil for many years, “and now we’re beginning to see the hard end of that”, adding that the Guardian and Telegraph were also facing major changes.
Writing in the Guardian’s website, professor of journalism Brian Cathcart predicted that all UK national newspapers would eventually go out of print.
He added: “No-one can say in what order it will happen, but it will happen to the most venerable titles, even to the top-selling Sun and Mail.”
@Agency report.
