The Independent: from brash 1986 launch to online-only newspaper
Three journalists walked out of The Daily Telegraph and launched a rival in 1986 under the cheeky slogan It is. Are you? Within three years The Independent sold over 400,000 copies. Three decades later, after changing hands for a nominal £1, it became one of the first British nationals to abandon print entirely.
Andreas Whittam Smith, Stephen Glover and Matthew Symonds timed their venture well. Rupert Murdoch had just beaten the print unions in the Wapping dispute, cutting production costs and opening room for newcomers, and the new paper recruited staff from Murdoch's broadsheets who refused to move to his new headquarters. The first issue appeared on 7 October 1986, aiming to lure centre-left readers from The Guardian while contesting The Times's status as the paper of record.
The 1990s were rougher. A Sunday edition in 1990 undersold, and when Murdoch's titles slashed prices the paper hit back with adverts mocking rivals' mastheads as The Rupert Murdoch and The Conrad Black. Money troubles brought in outside shareholders until Tony O'Reilly's group bought out the rest in 1998 for £30 million. Circulation slid below 200,000 and heavy spending never restored profits.
Design was one of its bolder bets. In September 2003 it began printing a smaller edition with the same content, branded compact to avoid tabloid connotations, and Murdoch's Times soon copied it. Sales rose about 15% by early 2004, and the weekday broadsheet ended that May. A European-style redesign modelled on France's Libération followed in 2005.
In March 2010 O'Reilly's company sold the title to the family of Russian businessman Alexander Lebedev for £1 plus £9.25 million over ten months, cheaper than closing it given long-term contracts. A plagiarism scandal involving columnist Johann Hari damaged its reputation in 2011. The final print edition came out on Saturday 26 March 2016, and the Sunday title closed a week earlier. Online, it has since expanded into Arabic under licence and Spanish, and in 2026 struck a deal to run the business and online side of The Evening Standard.
Source: The Independent
