The London Independent and Independent on Sunday newspapers will close for good at the end of March, their owner, Evgeny Lebedev, has confirmed. The final edition of the Independent will be published on March 26th, and the last Independent on Sunday will be printed on March 20th.

Mr Lebedev has indicated that the independent.co.uk news website will continue operations, but it is unclear how many of the 150 journalists currently employed by the company will keep their jobs.

The news will not come as a surprise to observers of trends in the UK newspaper industry. The two newspapers have been haemorrhaging money for many years. The Lebedev family bought them from Sir Anthony O'Reilly for £1 in 2010, but despite stringent cost-cutting, they are believed to have lost more than £65 million in the last five years. The Independent's paid circulation is 40,718 while the Sunday title sells 42,888 copies.

The two newspapers were the weakest by far in their domestic market, but the problems they face are endemic across an industry struggling to cope with the shift away from print and towards digital platforms for news.

National newspapers now sell nearly seven million print copies a day in the UK, compared with 13 million 10 years ago. Print advertising in the UK fell by £112 million in 2015, according to estimates from Enders Analysis, which is equivalent to half of the national newspaper industry's aggregate profits, or the combined wage bills of the London Times, Sunday Times and the Daily Telegraph.

Even the titles which have pivoted most speedily towards digital are continuing to struggle. MailOnline, which gets 14 million unique browsers per day, is still recording undisclosed losses. This week the Guardian, which has built large international audiences for its website and digital apps, told staff it would be seeking redundancies as part of a plan to cut costs by 20 per cent, following news that it had lost almost £80 million last year.

Paywall

While some titles have introduced paywalls and subscription models for their websites in recent years, with mixed results, others have pinned their hopes on digital advertising.

However, online advertising has proved to be an inadequate replacement for the old print model, and the picture is complicated by the increasingly powerful role played by intermediary services such as Google and Facebook, and by the audience’s shift to mobile devices.

In 2010, the Lebedevs launched the cut-price i newspaper at a price of 20p. The title, which now has a circulation of 200,000, is reportedly being sold to the Johnston Press group, which owns a range of media properties in the UK and Ireland. It remains to be seen exactly what the Lebedevs' plans are for independent.co.uk, which is seen as the most financially viable part of the operation.

The publisher said the website, which has 58 million monthly readers, is already profitable and is expected to see revenues grow 50 per cent this year. Evgeny Lebedev said the site will continue to “invest in quality journalism” opening new editorial bureaux in Europe, the Middle East and Asia, as well as an expansion of its US operation. The Lebedevs also owns the London Evening Standard, which makes a profit of around £2 million per year, along with a local TV channel, London Live, which reported a loss of £6 million for 2015.

Launched in 1986 by three former Daily Telegraph journalists at a time when new publishing technology allowed papers to produced much more cheaply, the Independent's centrist politics and refreshingly modern design won readers from the right and left of the political spectrum, reaching a circulation of over 400,000 within three years.

Decline

The Independent on Sunday was launched in 1990. But circulation began to slide in the 1990s, and even innovations (it was the first daily "quality" newspaper to move from a broadsheet to a compact page size) failed to staunch the flow.

The newspapers were owned by Irish businessman Sir Anthony O’Reilly’s Independent News and Media from 1995 until their sale to Evgeny Lebedev’s father, Alexander, in 2010.

“This decision preserves the Independent brand and allows us to continue to invest in the high quality editorial content that is attracting more and more readers to our online platforms,” said owner Evgeny Lebedev in a statement on Friday.

“The newspaper industry is changing, and that change is being driven by readers,” he added. “They’re showing us that the future is digital.”

The last issue of the Independent is expected to be published on March 26th, with the last issue of the Independent on Sunday on March 20th.