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Without the ‘i’ the Independent website may find that turning itself wholly digital does not work out.
Without the ‘i’ the Independent website may find that turning itself wholly digital does not work out. Photograph: Andy Rain/EPA
Without the ‘i’ the Independent website may find that turning itself wholly digital does not work out. Photograph: Andy Rain/EPA

The Independent: first victim of a confounding digital future

This article is more than 8 years old
Peter Preston
The brief period where transition from print to digital revenues seemed feasible has vanished almost overnight. Now we have to seek a new solution in the dark

Every so often, just like the owners of the Daily Telegraph or the ex-owners of the Indy, you need to pause and take stock because the fickle finger of digital change shifts continually. One moment online ads are growing fast, fuelling print newspapers’ assumed transition to cyberworld stability. Print advertising may decline, but digital makes good that gap. The next moment – thanks to ad blockers, smartphone dominance and sundry other impediments – the gap is widening again.

That’s a problem for the Barclay brothers at Telegraph Towers. The twins bought the daily and Sunday as a profitable business to develop and sell. But profits are shrinking, not growing: what was supposed to be £60m or so in the black fell £15m short last year. No great problem by most industry lights, but still one to worry the brothers. Cut and cut to come again, or look for the exit?

The Lebedevs, father and son, don’t quite have the Barclays’ money to spare. Good oligarchs have to dig deep these days. The Evening Standard they transformed makes a bob or three: the i – the innovative lite version of the Indy – may also be deemed in profit, if you draw the lines of viability creatively. It can be offloaded. But what about the abandoned mothership?

It’s yet another version of essentially the same story: transition, transformation, obliteration? Look around the wider print and digital world. One world leader produces a slightly better quarter result, but warns of trouble ahead. “It’s time to catch our breath and develop a strategic plan for what the New York Times should be, and determine how to apply our values to a new age,” says supreme editor Dean Baquet. Two acknowledged world leaders in open digital reach – look, no subs! – hit a bump. The Guardian hunts for savings. The Daily Mail group has a 3% overall ad hole year-on-year. Meanwhile tech industry shares wither suddenly: the fountains of investment cash turn to trickles as Twitter, Snapchat et al post gloomy figures. Bubbles puff to bursting level.

Of course there are a few bright spots. The signposts are always confusing. American ad e-business may actually be looking up a bit. The biggest boys of social media are standing in line, ready to bring outside-sourced news, if not outside control, to the revenue struggle for survival. But the problem of finding firm ground around news base camp remains damnably elusive.

And on the other side of the revenue mountain – where readers as well advertisers have to pay – there’s a buzz of movement. Some of it downwards as those News Corp revenues slide, and the Sun blows up its paywalls: but some of it still tolerably cheery.

The two founders of Blendle are heading to New York soon. In Holland, a couple of years ago, they came up with a bright idea: a system that lets readers enjoy the fruits of numerous consenting websites, paying a little money per piece rather than having to climb overforbidding paywalls. They signed up major Dutch, then German, papers. They have 650,000 subscribers on their books already and two big partners have bought a chunk of the action: Europe and the US, Axel Springer and the New York Times. Now the Blendle boys intend to launch in the States, moving on to France and the UK later. Think iTunes or Netflix. Why should great journalism on screen be free when everything else comes at a price?

So perhaps there’s a third way between high paywalls and open country. Other innovators, including Piano from Slovakia, are exploring their own parallel schemes internationally. British entrants – at The Browser, for instance – have more micropayment solutions. And Steven Brill, of course, has been peddling US-based solutions for years on end.

Brill, entrepreneur, lawyer, journalist, renaissance man, is a subscription apostle. Along with Gordon Crovitz, a former publisher of the Wall Street Journal, he founded a company called Press Plus, designer of purpose-built subscription answers, for a while before selling out and moving restlessly on. In many ways, Press Plus won its argument for a metered blend of paywalls and a certain number of open site visits a month so that subscription money came in while the clicks of passing trade remained high. It’s a compromise that the New York Times made almost commonplace, and one that the FT and Economist have used on their march to digital success. It’s where the Daily Telegraph has settled today.

But Brill was, and remains, a somewhat frustrated apostle. Only 10% of America’s newspaper digital audience ask for a price as yet. That means an overwhelming majority of the country’s 180 million monthly unique visitors still pay nothing – and every downward lurch in print advertising, on average 10% year after year, produces more crisis cost-cutting. Many of his converts (hundreds of different papers) set the number of permitted free access visits far too high: charging is feared as a risk too far. Thus the initial experience of bog standard metering doesn’t make financial sense and leads to a second great mistake: slicing back quality and distinctiveness.

“If you are going to sell content online, you need something to sell. You have to invest and lose money in the short term by beefing up the quality of what you were doing. We would tell people that, yes, the New York Times is reporting these results but they have hundreds and thousands of articles of high quality they were offering online. People aren’t stupid. They won’t buy stuff they can get anywhere else. They will only buy stuff they can’t get for free elsewhere,” Brill said in a Poynter Institute interview.

“For my money, look at the most successful online content business. It’s a non-profit, Consumer Reports. What does it do? It says if you want to know what kind of toaster to buy, give us $3.95 or something like that online to get all the toaster ratings or $29 to get all the ratings all year. It is high quality editorial content people are willing to pay for.”

Sir David Barclay (left) and his twin, Sir Frederick, bought Telegraph titles as a profitable business to develop and sell. But profits are shrinking, not growing. Photograph: Michael Stephens/PA

Too simple a diagnosis? Perhaps. So many American regional and local papers – like too many of their British brothers – look the same, read the same and lose profitability in the same way. That means – a common failing when you try to make sweeping comparisons – that the basic revenue differences of print existence tend to be brushed aside too easily.

Yet there is a huge print difference between a quality British national that might once have aspired to make 80% from advertising and a mass redtop tabloid where the majority of cash flows from cover pricing with ads as icing on the cake. At local level, too, revenue structures can alter with size and reach. The familiar old model dependent on just price and ads may seem straightforward, but it can be very complicated.

So there’s no reason why answers to the riddle of digital stability should be straightforward either. On the contrary, by the time you’ve lumped in native advertising, crowdfunding, sponsorship and merchandising, the crystal ball has already misted over. Nothing is necessarily forever.

But one Brill essential seems to be relevant whatever the context. If you’re going to sell a product made of news and pictures, they have to be excellent if they seek to command a price. A local paper, he says, that publishes the sports and local council reports which make community life go round, can be information to pay for. Or the FT, maintaining a formidable network of expert correspondents around the world. Or the New York Times, keeping a newsroom well over 1,000-strong.

And here’s the catch for the Lebedevs and fretting Barclays, among many others. If you’re asked to pay a high price for any of these news streams, you want, and must get, a special service. Brill remembers the editor on one big American paper where they’d been discussing installing a metered paywall. No dice, he was told. “It’s a good idea, but I’m not sure we still have anything left to sell.”

That refrain applies to too many big papers in Britain. What have the Desmond Stars and Expresses got left to sell? How many clicks to of advertorial destroy reader appetites? What’s the point of blanket celebrity coverage if the web does it better, with moving pictures? Whatever happened to Page 3?

The Telegraphs are in an interesting place, with metered access on the Brill model and profits made, but not lustrous enough to keep the owners happy. The continuing Indy website without the i may not find that turning itself wholly digital – devoid of print ads and cover prices – works out simply either. If you haven’t got various outlets to serve, if everything depends on one digital stream, the customary slimness of the organisation may suddenly seem too bloated instead.

But cuts aren’t some magic answer: they may be part of the problem – because when there’s exclusive news worth a price tag, the future grows a little brighter. Blendle’s inventors talk enthusiastically about the stories they’ve found sell best: long, chunky, crafted, original. The Economist reports paid subscriptions up 31% to 303,000 in a year. Journalism still lives. The demand is there, even in a few months of threshing change. Survival is just finding out how to deliver it.

Never quite say never. Remember how, almost 25 years ago, the Guardian plucked this newspaper from the jaws of Independent death. Remember, too, all the papers that rose and fell before digital came. But it still seems a moment to say that I’ll miss McRae and Cockburn, Fisk and Norman, Dent and Dejevsky (pictured), Wright and Rentoul; and so many of the names that gave the Indy wit and life.

Is there a role for an international digital contender without the substance of print dropping on a mat? We’ll see. Amol Rajan and his new team will too. (So far most turns down that road have been forced, not chosen.) But there has long been a role for individual, independent voices bridging the gap between political trenches and searching for common ground.

There are a few weeks of print life left to listen and think about what comes next. But it’s churlish, decades on, to wave the original form and idealism of the Independent goodbye without saying – in the heat of discussion and decision – that it will be missed.

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