How The Independent made a habit of reinventing modern journalism

"My stint editing The Independent came at a time of crisis, the darkest days of all”, wrote Andrew Marr in a collection of our journalism published nearly a decade ago. His time in the editor’s chair came between 1996 and 1998, covering that initial flush of New Labour. Over a year earlier, on 13 August 1996, The New York Times published a story with the headline, “Murdoch-led Newspaper War Threatens to Crush Britain’s Independent”. The breathless report went on to quote “incredibly gloomy” staff, and to lament redundancies and cost-cutting exercises.

What premature tosh that turned out to be from our American friends – just like all the other witless windbags and bloviators who have written us off before, and no doubt will do again. Since then The Independent has published millions of words and thousands of world-class newspapers. We have won countless vital campaigns, and fought just as many that we lost, but were no less worthwhile. We have reinvented journalism itself, beating a path that others would soon tread. It was “typical of The Independent”, wrote Rosie Boycott, another former editor, in that same compendium, “to… break the mould”.

Too true. In Paper Dreams, his wonderful book about our founding, Stephen Glover credits Nicholas Thirkell with the eagle, initially described as a “visual interest”, that adorns our masthead. The symbol of Ancient Rome conveyed strength, ambition and, above all, courage. The eagle is a bird of daring and this institution has been true to it. During our lifetime, no other newspaper has been as brave or as bold.

Critics and doubters wrote us off before we’d even started, but of course they were wrong to do so. They were out in force when, under Simon Kelner’s visionary leadership in 2003, we went from broadsheet to compact, again changing journalism along the way. The Times followed us, and The Guardian moved to the Berliner format. When, in 2010, we launched the first daily newspaper for years, a cut-price digest of The Independent called the i, we were again castigated from all sides, assailed by cynics and wise men alike. Yet within a few years, its circulation was greater than that of The Guardian.

With our latest move, I believe that we will conquer new heights. Newspapers in Britain are going to be around for a while yet, especially at the weekends; and specialist magazines and periodicals will be around basically forever. But when it comes to general interest, printed weekday news, in the long run we are all dead. Does this matter? Of course it does. As Marr, who understands the spirit of The Independent better than most, wrote after our closure was announced, the loss of a newspaper fractures the bond between an invisible community, and puts them in a state of mourning.

But if what matters is the ideas and intelligence, the values and judgement – the content, to put it in modern parlance – then why should the platform concern us? “My initial concern,” wrote George Orwell in his seminal essay “Why I Write”, which I have had cause to re-read of late, “is to get a hearing.” Today The Independent is heard the whole world over, with a fresh appeal across generations, genders and cultures. I have been overwhelmed in recent weeks by the positive reaction of regular readers to The Independent Daily Edition on tablet (iPad, Android and Kindle). Like me, thousands of you have discovered that though you pine for the crumple and aroma, the rustle and whiff, of newsprint, what you really love is the journalism, and you can download it in your bedroom for much less than the cost of the newspaper.

Earlier this week, I spoke separately in my office with two people with a very firm grasp of who, and what, this newspaper is for. The first person was Neil Shurety, the extremely charming winner of our charity auction. Mr Shurety, an archaeologist from Leominster in Herefordshire, bought our first edition back in 1986, and nearly every one since, save for when he was abroad. He said he and his wife Joanna had come to rely on The Independent just as they had BBC Radio 4: as a trusted friend and companion.

We talked about the values that he held dear, and which bonded him with our newspaper. And what it came down to was the principles of the Enlightenment: reason and tolerance; scepticism and scrutiny over superstition and sophistry; pluralism not bigotry. These, I said, were the principles that attracted me not just to journalism but to The Independent; and in my time in this job we have advanced them cogently and consistently, at a time when they are everywhere under siege.

The second person I talked to was Sir Andreas Whittam Smith, our distinguished founding editor, who taught me the meaning of the phrase “Standing on the shoulders of giants”. In the most recent of our regular meetings, he said he thought our iPad app was a revelation, that it could be a fine custodian of the spirit of The Independent, and that the paper today once again carried something of the panache of its first edition in 1986. “The character of any institution”, he told me, warming to a theme he also addresses in his essay in this supplement, “is formed in the early days. That’s when the DNA is encoded.”

From the beginning, right up until this final edition, The Independent has been radical. Students of journalism ought to give Sir Andreas, Stephen, and fellow-founder Matthew Symonds their due for this: what these great men achieved was remarkable. They knew that being radical doesn’t mean showing a flagrant disregard for history, but learning from it; nor does it mean being automatically left-wing or contrarian. It means elevating courage above conformity, and recognising that there is an established order which occasionally needs shaking up, and which becomes more robust, not less, through the scrutiny of, and challenge to, prevailing orthodoxies – functions that journalism is uniquely able to carry out.

Democracy never services its debt to radicals until long after their candle has flickered its last. But every society, and indeed industry, needs its buccaneers and entrepreneurs, its free spirits and explorers, who challenge the frontiers of thought and practice, and by sheer force of personality change the times in which they live. Not once, or twice, but thrice at least, The Independent has changed journalism itself for the better; and with our latest move I think we can do it again. What seems radical now will, I believe, be vindicated by history.

Never mind the Owl of Minerva, which spread its wings only with the falling of dusk; the bird next to the masthead is taking flight again, and countless others will follow where this eagle dared.