British newspapers The Independent and Independent on Sunday are set to close their print editions and move to a digital only platform, its owners ESI Media announced on Friday.
“The newspaper industry is changing, and that change is being driven by readers. They’re showing us that the future is digital. 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,” Evgeny Lebedev, owner of The Independent , said.
The last issue of the newspaper will be published March 26 and the final Independent on Sunday will hit newsstands March 20, with the brand continuing as digital only after that point. The two newspapers were started in 1986 and 1990 respectively.
The newspaper has faced sharply declining circulation. The daily’s peak circulation, recorded in November 1989, was 4,21,829 the Press Gazette, quoting ABC figures said. In December 2015 its circulation had dropped to 56,074.
In October 2010, The Independent launched i , a daily newspaper that is a concise version of the main paper. ESI Media has also confirmed that it will sell i to Johnston Press, subject to Johnston Press shareholder approval for £24 million. It is not yet know how many redundancies the move will cause. ESI Media said there would be “some redundancies among editorial employees” but announced 25 new “digital-content roles.”
The Independent had made a mark for its international reportage, with outstanding ground reporting from some of its contributing journalists like Robert Fisk.
However, some media-watchers say that the Independent’s downswing in circulation is because it did not have a consistent editorial policy was thus unable to build a trusting constituency of readers. “If they had a coherent editorial policy they could have grown a bit. They lost to the Guardian and other publications because their editorial policy was confused and shifted between many different poles,” Gavin MacFadyen, Director of the London-based Centre for Investigative Journalism told The Hindu.
