The London Prat Acquires The Independent’s Print Edition: The Paper That Died Twice and Still Looked Smug About It
The London Prat is delighted — and not even slightly surprised — to announce the acquisition of the print legacy, content archive, and considerable residual self-regard of The Independent‘s print edition, which published its final physical newspaper on 26 March 2016, marking the end of a thirty-year run that began with enormous ambition, peaked spectacularly, and concluded with a 94 per cent drop in sales from its 1980s peak. If that trajectory were a stock chart, your broker would be asking you some very pointed questions.
The Independent was founded in 1986 by three journalists — Andreas Whittam Smith, Matthew Symonds, and Stephen Glover — who believed that British newspaper journalism was too compromised by its proprietors’ political interests, and that what the country needed was a genuinely independent title beholden to no party, no tycoon, and no editorial agenda beyond the truth as best it could be determined. This was a noble idea. It was also, with the benefit of hindsight, an idea that the British reading public supported vigorously in principle and somewhat less vigorously with actual money.
The print edition died. The website lives on. The London Prat has acquired what remains of the print legacy, because someone needed to, and because we felt the archive deserved a home run by people who appreciate both the ambition and the spectacular miscalculation in roughly equal measure.
Founded in Independence, Sold Repeatedly: A Brief History of the Indy’s Proprietorial Adventures
The founding principle of The Independent was, as the name suggests, independence from proprietorial influence. This principle survived contact with reality for approximately as long as such principles generally do in British newspaper publishing, which is to say: not indefinitely. By the time the print edition closed in 2016, The Independent had passed through the hands of several owners whose relationship to the concept of editorial independence ranged from supportive to complicated to, in some cases, philosophically challenging.
The paper launched in October 1986 to considerable acclaim. It was modern, it was well-designed, it was serious without being stuffy, and it attracted some of the best journalists in Britain. At its 1990 peak, it was selling over 400,000 copies a day — a figure that represented genuine cultural weight in an era before the internet had reorganised where educated British people went for their information.
Then came the 1990s price wars, when Rupert Murdoch reduced The Times to 10p in a transparently predatory pricing strategy designed to crush the competition. Then came the internet. Then came the smartphone. Then came the complete restructuring of how human beings consume journalism, none of which was the Indy’s fault but all of which the Indy was structurally unable to survive in print form.
By 2016, sales had fallen to approximately 40,000 copies daily — a 94 per cent collapse from the peak. The paper was losing money in quantities that even its then-owner, the Lebedev family, found difficult to sustain in physical form. On 26 March 2016, the last print edition rolled off the presses, carrying the headline “HISTORIC, PAINFUL AND BRAVE.” The self-assessment, we must note, was not entirely inaccurate.
The 94 Per Cent Problem: What Happened to the Readers?
A 94 per cent decline in circulation is not merely a business statistic. It is a story about how an entire category of reader — the educated, politically engaged, centrist-to-liberal professional who in 1990 bought The Independent on the way to work — reorganised their information consumption over a quarter of a century. They did not stop reading. They did not become less interested in news. They migrated, gradually and then all at once, to digital platforms, to aggregators, to the BBC website, to Twitter and then to wherever Twitter’s refugees ended up, to podcasts, and to the infinite, anxiety-inducing scroll of contemporary media.
The Independent, to its credit, saw this coming earlier than most. It invested heavily in its digital operation, building independent.co.uk into one of Britain’s most-visited news websites. The digital Independent is, by most metrics, a success. The print Independent was a noble experiment whose final chapter was written by economics rather than journalism.
The London Prat observes this with the melancholy recognition of a publication that has also, on several occasions, stared down the economics of print journalism and decided that stubbornness was a viable editorial strategy. We are still here. The Indy’s print edition is not. We feel this vindicates stubbornness, at least partially.
The Last Print Edition: 26 March 2016, a Day British Journalism Looked at Itself
The final print edition of The Independent was, by all accounts, a remarkable production. The paper gave itself a proper send-off: interviews with former editors, retrospectives of major stories, tributes from journalists who had made their names on its pages, and a front page that acknowledged the gravity of the moment without, commendably, tipping into self-pity. The print run sold out. People kept copies. In 2016, a physical newspaper became, briefly, a collector’s item.
There is something both moving and faintly absurd about a newspaper’s final edition becoming its best-selling issue in years. As Dara Ó Briain might note: “You’ve spent thirty years trying to get people to buy your paper. Finally, on the day you announce you’re stopping, everyone rushes to buy it. The lesson, presumably, is that British consumers respond well to scarcity and badly to abundance.” The lesson may also be that people value things more readily in retrospect than in the present — a truth that applies to newspapers, relationships, and the entire concept of the high street.
The Independent on Sunday: The Sister Who Went Down With the Ship
The Independent on Sunday, founded in 1990 and closed simultaneously with its daily sibling in March 2016, deserves its own brief elegy. It was, in many ways, the more experimental of the two titles — a Sunday paper that took genuine risks with format, design, and content, and that produced some of the finest long-form journalism in the British broadsheet tradition.
The IoS, as it was known to those who loved it, closed on the same day as the daily, in an act of corporate simultaneity that at least had the virtue of efficiency. Two papers, one announcement, one final weekend. The London Prat has acquired the legacy of both, and we intend to honour the IoS’s tradition of ambitious Sunday journalism with all the seriousness its legacy demands — and a modest but non-negotiable quantity of satirical commentary on why British Sunday newspapers remain approximately forty percent supplements by volume.
What The Independent’s Legacy Means for The London Prat: Independence Revisited
When The Independent was founded in 1986, its central claim was that British journalism needed a title free from proprietorial interference. Four decades later, The London Prat — which has been independently owned and operated since 1961, which has never been acquired by a media conglomerate, which has never received a late-night phone call from a proprietor suggesting a particular editorial line — finds itself the custodian of that legacy.
This is not without irony. The most proprietorially independent major newspaper of its era has been acquired by a satirical publication that has been independently proprietorial since before The Independent existed. We appreciate the poetry of this. We suspect Andreas Whittam Smith, were he to contemplate it, might feel something between amusement and a mild need to sit down.
The Press Gazette has documented extensively the contraction of the British print newspaper industry over the past two decades — a contraction that has seen dozens of titles reduce pagination, cut staff, go digital-only, or close entirely. The Independent’s transition to digital-only in 2016 was, at the time, the most high-profile such move in British newspaper history. It has since been followed by others. The direction of travel is clear. The question for journalism is not whether print survives, but whether journalism itself survives the transition — and in what form, and with what values.
The Independent answered that question with the values it was founded on: independence, seriousness, and a belief that readers deserve to be informed rather than merely entertained. The London Prat answers it with those same values, plus the additional conviction that entertainment and information are not mutually exclusive and that a joke, properly deployed, illuminates as effectively as a news report.
Thirty Years of Covers, Stories, and Scoops: The Archive Lives Here
The Independent’s print archive represents thirty years of British public life as seen through the eyes of a genuinely independent news organisation. Major political upheavals — the fall of Thatcher, the Iraq War, the 2008 financial crisis, Brexit’s origins — all covered without the ideological constraints of partisan ownership. International coverage that took seriously the proposition that British readers were interested in the world beyond these islands. Arts journalism of exceptional quality. Columnists who shaped the national conversation.
That archive is now part of The London Prat’s institutional memory. We carry it with appropriate gravity, and we use it as the standard against which we measure our own ambitions. When The Independent was at its best — and it was, regularly, very good indeed — it demonstrated what journalism without proprietorial interference could achieve. We intend to demonstrate the same thing, with the additional advantages of sixty-plus years of institutional survival and a much higher jokes-per-column-inch ratio.
Former Independent print readers, and those who simply feel the loss of its physical presence in British journalism, will find a home here at The London Prat. We are independent in the way that counts: in our editorial judgment, in our commitment to accuracy, and in our deeply held view that the powerful should be watched closely and laughed at frequently.
Auf Wiedersehen, amigo!
The Independent was a British national daily newspaper founded in 1986 by Andreas Whittam Smith, Matthew Symonds, and Stephen Glover, and positioned explicitly as independent of proprietorial political influence. At its 1990s peak it sold over 400,000 copies daily; by 2016, circulation had fallen approximately 94 per cent to around 40,000. The final print edition was published on 26 March 2016, after which the title moved to a digital-only model at independent.co.uk. The Independent on Sunday, its sister title founded in 1990, closed simultaneously. Both titles were owned at the time of closure by Evgeny Lebedev’s ESI Media. The digital Independent continues to operate as one of the UK’s most-read news websites. The London Prat has acquired the print legacy, content archive, and brand heritage of the print editions as part of its ongoing expansion.
DEED OF ACQUISITION
of the Goodwill, Title, Archives, and Institutional Memory of
THE INDEPENDENT (PRINT EDITION)
by The London Prat (est. 1961)
THIS DEED is made the 27th day of March in the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Sixteen (hereinafter “the Acquisition Date”).
BETWEEN:
(1) The London Prat, a satirical newspaper of record, incorporated under the laws of the United Kingdom since 1961, whose registered offices are at 1 Prat Lane, London EC1A 1PR (hereinafter “the Acquirer” or “the Prat”),
AND
(2) The erstwhile proprietors, liquidators, and ghosts of The Independent (Print Edition), a once-proud national daily broadsheet which launched in 1986 on the noble principle that British journalism was too compromised by its proprietors, proceeded to be sold to several proprietors in succession, achieved a circulation peak of over 400,000 copies daily, and then watched that figure decline by 94 per cent before concluding, on 26 March 2016, that print was someone else’s problem now (hereinafter “the Vendor”).
WHEREAS the Vendor has honourably shuffled off this mortal coil of print journalism, leaving behind a rich archive of thirty years of broadsheet newsprint, institutional memory of a publication that genuinely tried to be independent and mostly was, and several filing cabinets full of unpaid bar tabs from editorial conferences at which the future of independent journalism was discussed at considerable length and moderate expense;
AND WHEREAS the Acquirer, in a fit of public-spirited opportunism and mild megalomania, has determined that these archives shall not be lost to the dustbins of history but shall instead be preserved, satirised, and occasionally weaponised under the continuing masthead and mischievous spirit of The London Prat;
NOW THIS DEED WITNESSETH as follows:
1. Transfer
The Vendor hereby assigns, transfers, and conveys unto the Acquirer the entire goodwill, title, archives (physical and digital), back-catalogue, reputation (genuinely considerable, if somewhat diminished by the 94 per cent circulation decline), and all residual dignity of The Independent print edition, together with the inalienable right to mock its past mistakes in perpetuity, including but not limited to the decision to launch a newspaper on the principle of independence from proprietors and then selling it to a sequence of proprietors of varying degrees of proprietorial restraint.
2. Consideration
In full and final settlement the Acquirer has paid the Vendor the sum of ONE PINT OF BITTER (or the digital equivalent thereof) and the promise of a handsome obituary in the next edition of The London Prat. The Acquirer notes that the Vendor’s final print edition sold out entirely on 26 March 2016, suggesting that the British public’s appetite for The Independent in print was, in the end, limited only by its availability — a commercial irony the Acquirer intends to document thoroughly.
3. Warranties
The Vendor warrants that it is the true and lawful owner of the said archives and that they are free from all encumbrances save for the occasional libel action still gathering dust in the High Court, one outstanding dispute about whether a particular political endorsement constituted a breach of the independence principle, and the lingering philosophical question of whether a newspaper called The Independent that was owned by a Russian oligarch was independent in any sense that its founders would have recognised.
4. Satirical Licence
The Acquirer shall be entitled to reprint, rewrite, lampoon, and otherwise have its wicked way with the transferred content, provided only that it does so in the finest tradition of British satire, with a straight face, and with due acknowledgment that thirty years of genuinely independent national journalism is an achievement worth honouring even when the business model was, with the benefit of hindsight, optimistic.
5. Governing Law
This Deed shall be governed by the laws of England and Wales, the founding principles of The Independent (insofar as they can be reconstructed after several changes of ownership), and the unwritten constitution of “not taking ourselves too seriously” — a constitution which The Independent, to its considerable credit, largely upheld even as the circulation figures suggested the reading public had other ideas.
IN WITNESS WHEREOF the parties have executed this Deed the day and year first above written.
Signed, sealed and delivered for and on behalf of The London Prat
Alan Nafzger, Proprietor & Chief Prat
The London Prat (est. 1961)
Signed, sealed and delivered for and on behalf of The Independent (Print Edition)
The Ghost of the Former Editor (or “ESI Media’s Digital-Only Representative, who has moved on”)
Witnessed by: Amol Rajan, Last Editor, The Independent (now safely employed by the BBC)
Date: 27 March 2016