i Editor's Letter: Celebrating 900 issues of the i
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Welcome to today’s i, the 900th. Many of you have been with us from the start – an unusual bond in British newspapers. We’re very grateful to all our readers for your continued support.
Andy Mullins, i’s managing director, has a huge Einstein poster on the wall of his office, declaring: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” That mentality goes some way to explaining why we launched the first new national newspaper in 25 years, back in October 2010.
Yesterday I asked Andy, who conceived i, what single episode stuck in his mind from the last three years. “Three months after launch,” he said, “we were only selling 50,000 copies. But we decided to go on TV with advertising [which is very expensive], purely on the basis that the reader feedback was so positive. We believed that if more people knew about i then we would sell more.
“Without this feedback – on email and Twitter – we might have thought it was a failure and pulled the rug. We are still going because of that relationship with our readers – that’s why it is still so important to us.”
How many other good ideas have been canned in their infancy, because such instant feedback was unavailable? Our former editor Stefano Hatfield last night sent me a text along similar lines, from a motorway service station: “The highs? Definitely the reader parties and the mailbox!” We tape the best correspondence to a reader wall in our newsroom, near the Editor’s chair, to keep us focused on who matters.
This weekend was a case in point: hundreds of emails responding to Saturday’s edition, especially our coverage of learner drivers and the row over regulating the press.
A negative narrative has built up around Britain’s newspapers – the most competitive in the world, for better and (in well-documented cases) for worse. Audited figures out on Friday showed that eight million people buy national papers in Britain every morning. Newspapers are alive! (i’s September daily circulation was 296,700, up 1 per cent on August and 4.8 per cent on this time last year.) Not to mention regional and local titles, our thriving magazine industry and the hundreds of millions of people around the world who read Fleet Street’s journalism online each month. Perhaps the Royal Mail should commission a series of stamps: brilliant British newspaper front pages.
In the meantime we’ll redouble our efforts to try to bring you an intelligent, concise daily read.
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