IN THE NEWSPAPER world everyone waits for a saviour to rise from these streets. Or app store. Freesheets, compact editions, tablet apps, iPhone apps, paywalls coming down, paywalls going up: they come, they work for some, they get copied by others, they fail for many. And the industry stumbles on, not sure how to get to where it’s going, not sure about where it is going in the first place.
So when the Independent– a failing quality newspaper sold by the O'Reillys to the Russian oligarch Alexander Lebedev for £1 (the price of a copy) – launched a "concise" edition called the i last year, its life was expected to be short. Ten months later it is outselling its parent newspaper and the combined titles have surpassed the Guardian'sdaily sales. And maybe this is what the press messiah looks like: a hybrid of Metro and the Independent, to be read in 20 minutes at a cost of just 20p; pithy and graphic, the internet as if it had been invented for print.
In fact, last month, when the phone-hacking scandal brought the British media to a level of disrepute many regarded as unprecedented, a certain irony resulted: several of the UK newspapers increased sales. The Guardian, whose dogged persistence eventually blew the story wide open, actually lost sales but can blame this statistic on the removal of international sales from its circulation figures. It is dropping its international edition later this year. The Independent on Sunday,long plummeting, briefly gained readers, while several tabloids gained hugely from the two million sales that flooded their way after the demise of News of the World.(The Murdoch titles the Timesand the Sunhad marginal increases, but only thanks to international sales. The Sunday Timesdropped below a million sales for the first time in 50 years.)
The upswing for many papers proves that big news still brings biggish sales. It’s likely that the riots in Britain will also have been good for sales, especially in a traditionally moribund month. If so, they will provide a brief lift in an otherwise inexorable drag towards extinction.
But it was the i's recent success that was most intriguing. Many Irish readers will be unfamiliar with the publication as anything other than a front page that appears on the newspaper reviews of BBC's Newsnightor Sky News. It is, effectively, the Independentin an edited form, filleted, redesigned, repackaged. Its news stories are brief and its analysis is briefer, with a short section in the middle of longer (though not particularly long) reads. That it has a five-clue crossword says everything you need to know about it.
It is a basically a 20-minute read, but with the option of a little extra reading should you feel like holding on to it. It is selling, perhaps, because it’s not much of a gamble. When it was launched several commentators declared that few readers would go out of their way to get to a newsagent and pay for it. However, its 20p cover price means it can be disposable while still feeling like good value if you decide to hold on to it and read it right through. Nor does it foster the guilt of carrying around an unread £1 newspaper (or more in Ireland, of course).
It reads a little like a cheat sheet for the world’s news but does not feel like a swizz.
The appealing design, meanwhile, is at times almost ludicrous in its pithiness yet still busy with information. It is influenced by another i, an unrelated Portuguese newspaper with a small circulation but gorgeous, groundbreaking design, which was awarded the top prize at this year’s Society for News Design awards.
Attracting advertising and profits is another matter, but in pure readership terms i is a curious success. In a month when the Independent'scirculation jumped by 3.5 per cent, the i's sales outstripped it, even if the gap was only 800 copies. Both newspapers sell 180,000 copies a day, although when you discount discounted copies, the i has twice as many paid-for sales as the Independent.
In Ireland, oddly, we also have a newspaper, the Irish Independent, which has a dual format, although without the innovation. The broadsheet is a stretched version of the tabloid, with the same content and same graphics, just different-sized pages. Besides, the UK, and London specifically, is different. Its commuting network has always been better suited to newspaper distribution and sales than Dublin's, which proved an infuriating city for Metroand Herald AMbefore their merger.
However, the i contains some lessons. It was aimed at younger readers who might later graduate to the Independent,yet most of its readers are ABC1 and half of them are over 45. It is not a young person's paper, because young people are not the only ones who have been abandoning print. The i may not be a messiah come to lead them back, but it's worth following for a while nonetheless.
Twitter: @shanehegarty
