The Independent, and independence
Some part of me remains with The Independent, the newspaper where I spent a decade and which closed earlier this year. Heart; soul; liver, perhaps. It was more than just a line on the resume, a logo on my LinkedIn profile. I am marking it this week by attending a party in London to celebrate the paper and its foreign reporting.
I left the paper in late 2000, convinced that it would not survive the coming digital revolution in journalism. In one sense that was correct: the rise of the Internet and the decline in newspaper advertising finally made it too hard for the paper’s latest owners to stay the course and they closed it down, just short of its thirtieth birthday. It survives as a digital-only publication, competing now with anyone that has a railroad apartment in Brooklyn, a little knowledge of Wordpress and access to cute animal GIFs.
In several other senses, I was totally wrong. For a start, the dot com for which I left the Independent went bust within six months, which hardly makes me a farsighted prophet of the new media dawn. The paper lasted another fifteen years. And in its fight with the Internet, honestly, the Independent could probably have survived, as has the Guardian, if its owners had had deeper pockets, or been more stubborn, or commercially acute, preferably all three. The digital storm has brought down some great trees in the newspaper forest but many others survive. My prediction of the paper’s death was too early, and things could have been different.
What independence meant
Or perhaps they couldn’t. The paper’s original genius lies in its name: it was supposed to be politically independent. The UK has and had then many partisan papers with leanings towards left and right. In the context of Thatcherite Britain, where class and party conflict were bitter and bloody, being independent was a big statement. As guarantors of that, we had some measure of independence of ownership: initially, at least, control was split between a wide variety of shareholders, including institutional investors and European media houses.
The price of independence was financial weakness. Many of the other papers had wealthy, influential and opinionated barons as their proprietors. And they had their money. When the Independent hit its first financial storms, in the early 1990s, it was not well equipped to handle the bad weather. Some of the owners bailed out, and we were left with a clumsy crew of feuding captains and no clear strategic direction from the bridge. When these owners were thinned out, we were left with Mirror Group Newspapers as our main owner, and a dreadful job they did. They moved us from our home in the edge of the City of London to Docklands, a grim and sterile place. They loathed our paper and they hated us, regarding us as snobby, over-educated dilettantes with little understanding of the grubby business of selling newspapers to middle England. They were right about the first part of course, but their raw contempt didn’t help change our minds, and as it turned out they understood little of the dark commercial arts themselves.
Tony O’Reilly, Irish media mogul, followed, and a more enlightened era gave us a remarkable second wind. With him came a new and more populist take on the world that had a fighting chance of saving the paper. But he ran out of money too. A Russian oligarch took the paper into its golden years, moved it to the West End and ultimately killed it off, as if in a cheap thriller.
Our founders chose not to bless us with a strong, forceful owner with political beliefs he wanted to impose on the world, in other words, and in the end that helped spell doom for the paper.
I write what I like
You win some, you lose some. The virtues of independence were huge. Unlike many of my colleagues as a British journalist, I could usually write what I wanted. My editors didn’t have to publish it, but they usually did. We were led by the correspondents — not by our editorial page, our owner, the subeditors or the ad men: we had independence. As Britain emerged from the frozen conflicts of Thatcherism and the old left, as Europe threw off its historical divisions in 1989, Nelson Mandela emerged from prison, that was a wonderful thing. The paper attracted a clutch of truly wonderful correspondents who wanted to be able to tell the story their way. They were a dreadful pain in the arse to manage, as I discovered when Foreign Editor, but my goodness they could write. And the paper’s historical commitment to good photography made those stories roar.
Many pieces roared at greater length than they would have done in other papers; usually with merit, sometimes without. Leaving the direction of coverage largely in the hands of the journos in the field did not always work. The loudest voices sometimes took the largest slots on the page. And we did not always cover the foreign stories that others did: the Brits abroad in trouble, the murders, celebrities and gossip that sustained some of the other papers were often ignored, sometimes correctly, sometimes not. Man cannot live by Bosnia alone.
But our coverage of that dark, vicious war was important and at its best brilliant. So was our reporting of the revolutions in Eastern Europe, the Gulf War, Tiannanmen Square, the end of apartheid and the ascent of Nelson Mandela… It becomes invidious to choose after a while. The time of the Independent’s life was a period of enormous upheaval and change in global affairs and it made for great reporting.
Paying the bill
The cost of this great reporting was huge. We had perhaps two dozen full correspondents and half as many “super stringers” (not on staff, but paid a retainer), a long list of freelance stringers and the budget to pay them, as well as regional specialists in London, diplomatic and defense editors, and a well-staffed desk, with a foreign editor, deputy, four assistant foreign editors, foreign manager and assistant. It was imperial, and very costly, though as well as the usual revenues from advertising and subscriptions the paper made a ton of money from syndication, selling copy to other world newspapers. Our coverage probably covered its costs when that was taken into account. But it became increasingly hard to justify as the paper retrenched everywhere in the 1990s in the face of falling ad revenue and shrinking circulation.
Every foreign editor from 1991 had to face the grim arithmetic of cuts: weighing Vienna against Lagos, Beijing against LA, choosing to keep this young woman on retainer while sending that old stager into premature retirement.
I spent a decade with the paper, with a stint in London on the desk and another as Foreign Editor. My two postings were Brussels during the depths of British conflict with the European Union, and Washington at the height of the Clintons. These were the inbetween days, after the Berlin Wall and before 9/11, when everything seemed possible politically; and yet the signs of what were to come in world affairs were everywhere, if you knew where to look. We ran the first newspaper interview with Osama bin Laden; I remember the conversations with the editor as if it were yesterday about this angry man, threatening much, yet apparently just shouting from the sidelines. What could he possibly matter? Why should we put him in the front page? What was he so angry about?
Up to a point, Lord Copper
Since 2001, the world has been moving towards different ways of reporting global affairs. The model of the foreign desk, specialists, expatriate correspondents with local stringers and fixers, “firemen,” Is receding as are “splashes”, scoops, editions, alongside the telex, the “wires”, the rich baroque repertoire of foreign reporting that remained recognizable from Evelyn Waugh in my time. I am sad, because it was my world, but as long as entrepreneurial and literate men and women are able to bring news from the rest of the world and tell it in entertaining and compelling ways, that’s good. I don’t think the Independent was the only place to do that or uniquely good at it; and I don’t think that enterprise ceased with GT68 machines, slip editions and the night train to Scotland, any more than it ended with the Independent. But I am sad at the passing of a moment, a group of people, a shared commitment, as much as a product.
I don’t think i would have the same fondness for the paper if I had worked there in the 2000s. The staff had shrunk and so had the budget for travel. And by then, the foreign department was perhaps half what it had been, and then a quarter. It still did amazing things but they were fewer. And I had another great job or two after The Independent, so I cannot regard it as my life’s work in the way of those who spent twenty years or more there.
I am hesitant to write an obituary for it, because good friends still work on the website, and because I always ground my teeth when departing colleagues wrote vengeful, bitter, negative stuff about “the dream that failed,” often bigging up their own roles and talking down others while they sauntered off to spend their redundo money on bitter gall and cheap claret.
I believed in it, and it still shapes my view of the world. I believe in good reporting of global affairs made readable and exciting for a broad audience, as a public good and as a commercial service. I believe in reporting that is free of prejudice and interference. I believe in the importance of independent media, whether it is holding the powerful to account or writing clever pieces about strange places to entertain the curious, because that matters too. The world is a huge and complex place and no single voice can describe it; we need more voices and stronger ones. We did our best, and on a good day, our best was very good indeed.
