Independent 's boss Evgeny Lebedev mulls exiting print
12 Feb 2016
The owner of The Independent and Independent on Sunday Evgeny Lebedev is considering closing the print edition and taking the newspaper entirely online.
Though the final decision from Lebedev and his lieutenants is still awaited, the economics of print editions had become increasingly strained with the decline of copy sales across the industry, while readers switched to digital.
The likely decision had been prompted by Lebedev's decision to sell the tabloid edition "i", the cut-price national title, which provided financial support to The Independent, to Johnston Press, the owner of the Scotsman, in a £25 million cash deal.
If the sale were to go through, according to commentators, Lebedev would look to invest the proceeds into further developing the independent.co.uk website into an international digital news brand even as he stopped printing the newspapers.
Amol Rajan, the editor of The Independent, in an email to staff, acknowledged that there would be a ''lot of questions and uncertainty''.
His message to the 150 full-time Independent and i staff, supported by casuals, offered no balm for their fears over closure. ''For the time being we really are bound by strict rules on what we can and can't say about this potential deal,'' he said. ''I will obviously do all I can to keep everyone updated as soon as possible, within the guidelines of the law.'' He thanked staff for their ''understanding''.
The i newspaper, with a daily circulation of around 270,000 copies and an operating profit of around £5 million last year, has been providing financial support to The Independent. It is believed that proceeds from the sale of i will be channelled towards developing the independent.co.uk website into an international digital news brand.
The Independent was established in 1986 by a group of journalists led by Andreas Whittam Smith who sought to provide readers with independent news reports, not influenced by media ownership and political partisanship.
Initially, the broadsheet enjoyed success and acclaim for its news coverage, and was able to carve a niche among other more established newspapers such as The Times, The Guardian and Daily Telegraph.
The Lebedev family bought The Independent for £1 in 2010 from Anthony O'Reilly and the paper had been struggling to keep up with the changing readership trend in the UK's transformation to a digital society on the one hand, and the rising labour and production costs on the other.
Meanwhile, The Independent's circulation figures of 40,000 copies for both its titles continued to stagnate and decline.
According to the latest publicly available figures for The Independent for the year to September 2014, the company had incurred trading loss of £4.6 million.