Wednesday, January 28, 2009

How to Prevent The Independent From Closing

One of my new year's predictions was that The Independent newspaper would go out of business. It seems that top media commentator Roy Greenslade agrees with me. He has written a very perceptive article in tonight's Standard suggesting that that end is nigh and that the Independent's owners should do something really radical to prevent the inevitable. He proposes that they should stop printing a print edition and put the whole thing online.

It's the sort of suggestion that Sir Humphry Appleby would characterise as "courageous".

23 comments:

  1. Depends on the reader profile I suppose - if they read them online might be the last roll of the dice and allow a shrunken edition. Maybe chop the content down as well.

    Maybe the Independent has a bigger problem though as it has identified to closely with the Left in the last ten years or so? First Labour then the LD's - it has flirted with the Tories but that seems to be it. The Indy may be a vicitim of both economic hard times and a political change.

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  2. The removal of idiots Robert Fisk and Yasmin Alibaba Brown from the dead tree press scene would be most welcome.

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  3. The 'Independent' is a gross misnomer. It is a trendy lefty rag.

    On the subject of the web and newspapers - I think web versions of newspapers are important - they offer a record of most of their articles for one and I 'leaf' through the web pages.

    Unfortunately it only reminds me of the great swathes of the print editions I am not interested in.
    I think for reasons like this the print media do not really create truly efficient and readable on line newspapers so one or more totally dedicated to the task might be a good idea.
    It would be interesting to see what they look like.

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  4. I'd be delighted to see it go. Is horrible Hari still preaching from there? Not to mention that great asset to race relations that is Y.A.B.

    The sanctimonious rubbish that pours forth from the Independant will not be missed in this house.

    Perhaps a small article about how we can bang another little nail into it's coffin would be possible??

    Wouldln't it be nice if The Guardian were next.

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  5. Pity if it closes, it's actuaklly showing signs of actually being Independent.
    Now if they'd drop their self appointed role as the climate change experts that'd be even better.

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  6. too bad it's not the Daily Mail going down instead...

    is there no justice in this world?

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  7. I'd much prefer if it was The Grauniad that faced the threat of closure. I take the Devil's Kitchen view that the world would be a much better place without Polly Toynbee's newspaper columns.

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  8. Surely this is the most pressing case yet for a substantial government bail-out.

    How else will the Today programme receive the correct editorial directives?

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  9. "I take the Devil's Kitchen view that the world would be a much better place without Polly Toynbee's newspaper columns."

    That's a view shared by many tbf.

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  10. Indy to close? Great. Might get a decent free newspaper at Greens gyms.

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  11. How do they make money by being online? (not that make any money anyway) I've never got my head round that. Sure, people pay for advertising but still, aren't they just competing in a market that is dominated by Reuters or the BBC and therefore, ain't gonna happen.

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  12. The Boston Christian Scientist made the descion to go on-line only last year.

    How's this for a radical idea?

    The Independent goes right-wing, to fill the gap left by the Telegraph yellowing to the left.

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  13. The Boston Christian Scientist made the descion to go on-line only last year.

    How's this for a radical idea?

    The Independent goes right-wing, to fill the gap left by the Telegraph yellowing to the left.

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  14. Maybe the Independent should hold fire- there could well be an early General Election coming.

    This Evening Gordon Brown was said to be in tears in his H of C room talking about leadership elections and speculation.

    There may well be a serious move against Brown by the end of next week as a delegation of "Men in Grey Suits" tells Brown's number is up.

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  15. How about foregoing the Egalitarian Fiction, unanimous throughout the Drive-By Media, by acknowledging the reality of innate human differences?

    There are extensive political implications to these innate differences which are almost totally ignored by the Drive-By Media. For example the contradiction in the Drive-By Media consensus that nearly all top jobs being occupied by males is due to sexism whilst the fact that nearly all prisoners are male is not.

    Or how about a prominent review of 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution with an ongoing series of articles exploring it's political implications.

    From Amazon.com ...

    Resistance to malaria. Blue eyes. Lactose tolerance. What do all of these traits have in common? Every one of them has emerged in the last 10,000 years.


    ... Human evolution in fact accelerated after civilization arose, ... and these ongoing changes have played a pivotal role in human history. They argue that biology explains the expansion of the Indo-Europeans, the European conquest of the Americas, and European Jews' rise to intellectual prominence. In each of these cases, the key was recent genetic change: adult milk tolerance in the early Indo-Europeans that allowed for a new way of life, increased disease resistance among the Europeans settling America, and new versions of neurological genes among European Jews.


    Ranging across subjects as diverse as human domestication, Neanderthal hybridization, and IQ tests, Cochran and Harpending's analysis demonstrates convincingly that human genetics have changed and can continue to change much more rapidly than scientists have previously believed. A provocative and fascinating new look at human evolution that turns conventional wisdom on its head, The 10,000 Year Explosion reveals the ongoing interplay between culture and biology in the making of the human race. ...

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  16. The answer is obvious. The taxpayer should subsidise The Independent.

    How else do you expect the journalists to pay the schools fees?

    I hope you do not expect their children to go to school with Sun readers!

    Maybe they could have sponsored hate days?

    Anybody found harbouring Enid Blyton books could be shot and their house ransacked by the social justice police.

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  17. This article is from late November, not today. It seems Roy beat you to it!

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  18. There was a photo of me in the very first edition of The Independent... it was in a kind of mock competition thing. It said something like Caption competition or What are they saying... with a pic of me and a young lady ... ahem...This is true by the way.

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  19. Well, the owners could do what those of the Standard did: sell 71% of the newspaper to a Russian oligarch. Then again, those oligarchs are not quite that stupid.

    What does it matter if it goes out of business? People don't want to read it. Tough. Hundreds of newspapers have gone out of business since the eighteenth century when it all started.

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  20. Rather more to the point, how many newspapers - particularly serious ones - will be left at all within 10 years?

    They are dropping like flies in the US. Many big cities no longer have a daily newspaper.

    And no online newspaper operation provides anything like the sort of income needed to sustain and staff a serious paper.

    As to the Indie, it’s never looked commercially healthy since it started.

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  21. Actually I think he would have called it "brave". Is there a difference between "courageous" and "brave"?

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