London Independent ‘gone by Christmas’

Posted on 21st September, 2009 by

UPDATE 1-O’Brien sees London’s Independent closed by Dec | Industries | Technology, Media & Telecommunications | Reuters

Denis O’Brien, the second largest shareholder in the Independent News and Media group, has said that the Independent newspaper, the weakest of the four ‘quality’ London dailies, will close by Christmas:

“There’s no point in us as a company subsidising a newspaper that really nobody wants to read in the United Kingdom,” O’Brien told Bloomberg TV in an interview on the sidelines of the Global Irish Economic Forum.

“It’s not a relevant newspaper anymore and this newspaper’s going to be closed by Christmas,”said O’Brien, who has been at odds with the company’s board over plans to refinance a 200-million-euro debt issue that was meant to be paid in May.

Newspaper sales in Britain have been dwindling for years in the face of growing competition from television online news providers.

“There is the possibility of a consensual deal (with bondholders) but it is by no means certain,” O’Brien told reporters separately at the conference. “The situation is serious and fraught.”

To be honest, I bought the Independent a few years ago but have been a solid Guardian reader for the past several years (actually, our whole family has taken the Guardian since I was a child). The Guardian’s coverage has variety and balance; the Indie’s is a mixture of outrage and dullness. Currently, it’s edited by the same guy who led the Observer to take a pro-war stance during the Iraq war (see the section “The Blinded Observer” in Nick Davies’ Flat Earth News), and quite possibly his becoming editor made the paper less prestigious rather than more. Its collapse will strengthen the Guardian, which can only be a good thing.

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  • http://eclecticalmanac.wordpress.com Atia Azmi

    An interesting point of view, but I have to disagree with you. The fewer dissident voices there are out there, the more the Guardian’s perspective will appear to be ‘outlandish’ and renegade. I also have found the Independent’s coverage of environmental issues (although its vision is sometimes a bit apocalyptic) to be far better than most other broadsheets.

  • M Risbrook

    If it wasn’t for all the public sector and BBC jobs being advertised in the Guardian then that newspaper would have been dead and buried decades ago.

    Most of the money you spend on a newspaper is retained by the retailer and the transporter. The publisher makes it money from advertising, not sales.

  • M Risbrook

    The former student of Kesgrave Hall School I have contact with would like to ask the owner of this blog a question. Which ITV company did he pefer: Thames or Anglia?

  • http://www.blogistan.co.uk/blog/ Indigo Jo

    LOL, I can’t remember much about either company. Thames lost its licence a long time ago and I have only sketchy memories of Anglia. I do remember preferring the old Oracle teletext to the Daily Mail-run service which took over after the change of franchises in the early 1990s.

  • M Risbrook

    Did Kesgrave Hall School eventually buy a television with teletext? The former student I am in contact with repeatedly nagged the staff to buy one but they never did during his time there.

  • http://www.blogistan.co.uk/blog/ Indigo Jo

    I don’t think we ever had Teletext at KHS. I know about it because we had it at home.

  • s.ali

    I agree with Atia.

  • http://folio.me.uk Tim

    I used to consider The Independent “my” newspaper, but for months now have just found it uninspiring. Fisk rants, Alabi-Brown rants, Hari rants… substance feels in short supply. That’s the opinion side of course. On their journalism, maybe I’ve just become too lazy to trudge through it every day.

    On the environment issue, the Independent always seems to shoot itself in the foot on this… a big headline on global meltdown to accompany the travel feature for a location you could only reach by long-haul flight and a list of the 50 best gadgets. Confused.

  • KHS Old Boy

    Indigo Jo :

    I don’t think we ever had Teletext at KHS. I know about it because we had it at home.

    Not while I was there, but suspect that was more to do with the fact that to have Teletext, you needed to have a remote controlled TV, and there is no way that was going to work. The remote was either going to get nicked or lost and the more devious and electorally savvy pupils would have “built” their own remote and it would have ended up in “remote wars”.

  • M Risbrook

    I can assure you that remote controls are generally matched to the appliance it is sold with and the remote control for one TV rarely works with a different TV.

  • http://www.happymuslimah.com Umm Salihah

    I too agree with Sister Atiya and S Ali, I kind of prefer the Indie, especially Fiske’s writing, although I would be glad to see Yasmin Alibhai Brown with one less platform to spout nonsense from.

  • KHS Old Boy

    M Risbrook:

    I can assure you that remote controls are generally matched to the appliance it is sold with and the remote control for one TV rarely works with a different TV.

    I don’t understand the relevance of that comment, I know that remote control is matched to the appliance it is sold with. If you re-read what I said :

    the more devious and electorally savvy pupils would have “built” their own remote and it would have ended up in “remote wars”

    You will see I was talking about the 4 or 5 pupils that were there at the same time as me, that were more than capable of picking up either the Maplin or Radio Spares catalogue and with the help of a few electronics magazines building their own custom IR remote.

  • http://jewssansfrontieres.blogspot.com levi9909

    I found the reasoning in the post curious. I read the Guardian on line and on the rare occasion that I buy a newspaper on any day from Monday to Saturday it will be the Independent. The Guardian poses as a liberal paper but its approach to Palestine stinks. They have resident zionists writing most of the commentary and editorials on Palestine/Israel and yet the anti-zionists that work for the paper are rarely called upon to write about Palestine. Maybe because the Independent has a smaller circulation, articles criticising Israel slip through the net without stirring “the lobby” but I have always found the Indie’s output on Palestine to be more critical of Israel.

    Of course both the Guardian and the Independent are far better regarding I-P than the rest of the media from the perspective of an anti-zionist.

    I hope the blogger here is right that if the Indie goes (Indigo - woops!!) the Guardian will improve but I think it will just use its monopoly to further promote the zionist cause whilst allowing just enough criticism of Israel to have the lobby play the sparring game of pretending that the Guardian is some other than just another zionist mouthpiece.

  • Codf1977

    I wish to make it clear that before anyone jumps in – I am neither pro or anti Israel or pro or anti Palestine but I am fed up to the back teeth with people assuming that everyone falls into one of the camps.

    Levi9909 : “The Guardian poses as a liberal paper but its approach to Palestine stinks. They have resident zionists writing most of the commentary and editorials on Palestine/Israel and yet the anti-zionists that work for the paper are rarely called upon to write about Palestine.”

    Reading that came as a bit of a shock so did a bit of looking and came as across http://proudzionist.blogspot.com/2009/08/guardians-extreme-anti-israel-bias.html where someone else takes the opposite view. Without the time to read every word every paper publishes or every word spoken on every news channel or program, no one can say for sure who is right and who is wrong.

    I take it as a matter of comfort that over the last 30 years, whoever has been in government in the UK has accused the BBC of bias against it – Thatcher did it in the 80’s, Blair did it in the 2000’s. The same is true of this issue, the hard-line supports of each side accuse every news outlet of being pro or anti Israel or pro or anti Palestine depending on the position they take on any given sub-issue.

    It is however clear, that while the self appointed leader of the anti-Israel movement - Mahmoud Ahmadinejad spouts the ridicules line he does any independent minded individual is going to view Israel as under threat from others in the region.

    Both sides are as guilty as each other, Israel has to pull black out of the occupied territories and stop the shelling of them; the Palestine’s and other Arabs in the region have to accept Israel’s right to exist without fear of attack.

  • s.ali

    Cod - perhaps you should do some research before commenting on Foreign Affairs. By the way, what exactly are the occupied Territories and who are the ‘other Arabs’ in the region?

  • M Risbrook

    You will see I was talking about the 4 or 5 pupils that were there at the same time as me, that were more than capable of picking up either the Maplin or Radio Spares catalogue and with the help of a few electronics magazines building their own custom IR remote.

    I’m unable to comment on the talents or expertise of former Kesgrave Hall School students when it comes to electronics. However, building your own remote control using the ICs available from RadioSpares during the late 80s would be quite a challenging task. The reason I know is because I have already tried building infra red remote control transceiver systems using discrete logic gates. Building your own remote control around a microcontroller or dedicated remote control IC nowadays is a piece of cake. Microcontrollers didn’t generally become available to small scale users until 1994. The designer of a remote control to be used with a particular appliance must find out the correct pulse sequences to operate each function. This can only be accomplished using the original remote control. A home made remote control using a microcontroller can easily incorporate a facility to ‘learn’ pulse sequences from an existing remote control and retransmit them. Anybody building a remote control from discrete logic gates will be spending hours in front of an oscilloscope whilst pressing buttons on the original remote control.

  • Codf1977

    s.ali : “perhaps you should do some research before commenting on Foreign Affairs. By the way, what exactly are the occupied Territories and who are the ‘other Arabs’ in the region?”

    I think it is you that needs to read up on “Foreign Affairs” – If you want information on the Occupied Territories may be you should look here - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli-occupied_territories - as for whom I was referring to when I said “and other Arabs in the region have to accept Israel’s right to exist without fear of attack” – again a quick look in the internet would have pointed out numerous cases of individuals, groups or countries in the region that do not accept Israel has a right to exist.

  • KHS Old Boy

    M Risbrook

    However, building your own remote control using the ICs available from RadioSpares during the late 80s would be quite a challenging task

    I would not know how challenging it was, having never tried it, or done it myself. What I do know is that it was possible, the then boyfriend (now ex-husband) of my sister, while I was at KHS, built a ‘remote’ that would with a single button press turn on his TV, switch to channel 0, turn on the video player and play the video.