Barrie Clement recalls the momentous launch of The Independent


First days at a pioneer paper I


t was a bizarre start for what became a groundbreaking and politically independent newspaper. All three founders had been senior Telegraph journalists, two of them leader writers, on a paper that suffered from


sclerotic conservatism. Nevertheless, the privately educated Oxford graduates


Andreas Whittam Smith, Stephen Glover and Matthew Symonds (whose daughter married Boris Johnson by the way), became the unlikely troika who established Te Independent 40 years ago. It became a highly successful publication; leader columns were by reputation right of centre on economics but liberal when addressing social issues. I never read them. Te paper’s journalists were largely on the left, but there was a sprinkling of Tories and one right-wing anarchist, who was, it has to be said, slightly bonkers. It was the first newspaper I’d worked on where I


genuinely felt no pressure whatsoever to toe any political line. To be fair, Te Times, the establishment’s favoured newspaper at the time, came close to that. But there was always proprietor Rupert Murdoch lurking in the background. Te launch of Te Indie was greatly helped by the fact


that it came at the tail end of the Wapping dispute during which Murdoch forcibly introduced new technology on his


by unionised workers. And, by then, the whole of Fleet Street was introducing the technology. Te atmosphere at Te Indie was so positive that one


former Times sub-editor thought himself in journalistic nirvana and that we didn’t need an NUJ chapel. Overwhelmingly, he was considered naive and ignored. Te Wapping dispute also helped with recruitment. A


significant number of journalists working on Te Times and Te Sunday Times wanted to escape Fortress Wapping. So it attracted a ready-made coterie of experienced journalists more than happy to transfer to a serious, liberal-minded paper. As I walked into the newsroom in 40 City Road on my first day, there were a lot of familiar faces – more than


one-third of them were ex-Murdoch employees. Some six months earlier, my first meeting with Whittam Smith had left me with the impression that I was dealing


ED BUZIAK / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO Political bias rejected in aim for the centre


The Independent first saw the light of day on October 7 1986. It was the first wholly new upmarket national newspaper in more than a century (The Telegraph had launched a Sunday edition in 1961). The three founders, all Telegraph journalists,


sought to place the new paper in the centre of British politics, taking readers from The Guardian on the left and The Times and The Telegraph on the right. It also aimed to draw in readers who may have become disenchanted with the other titles and wanted a paper that did not favour one side or the other. It began as a broadsheet and changed to compact or tabloid format in 2003 – a change


12 | theJournalist


subsequently adopted by The Times and, later, by The Guardian. The Independent hit a circulation of more than 400,000 by 1989; The Independent on Sunday was started in 1990. That decade saw the Murdoch titles cut their


cover prices to see off its rival. It was an approach that presented financial problems for the new title and meant new investors were needed. However, the policy failed to see it off. The paper survived in printed format until


Saturday March 26 2016, leaving only the online edition. The i, launched in 2010, was originally a sister paper, but eventually went its separate way.


papers, which also included the Sunday Times, Te Sun and the now-defunct News of the World. He did it by switching production of the titles from central London to Wapping and sacking 6,000 employees who were seeking to negotiate the introduction of the new techniques. It meant Te Independent could use new technology but this came at a great human cost. Nevertheless, Te Independent was printed and distributed


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