There is something terribly wrong at the Independent. It is not that it is a bad newspaper. It is not that it does not present some fine writing, compelling features and thought-provoking columns. It is not that its coverage of business, the arts or sport is especially inferior to that of its rivals. It is, quite simply, that hardly anybody reads it any more.
The Independent and the Independent on Sunday have become marginalised. The papers, produced on a shoestring in comparison with their rivals, are beginning to look like squatters in the national quality market. They are like two educated gentlemen - or, in the case of the Sindy, more an educated gentlewoman - whose luck has deserted them, and who, any day now, are likely to be moved on by the police and warned sternly about loitering.
This is, especially in the case of the daily, sad enough to draw tears from a matinee audience, were it played out on stage or screen. The paper's rugged editor, Simon Kelner, is hardly an archetypal hero figure of modern journalism. He is known to take a drink on occasion and has even been seen eating lunch at lunchtime, while his contemporaries remain hunched over their desks with a rocket salad sandwich clamped between their teeth and a bottle of Evian to hand. But he is a talented chap, and those who believe there is more to newspapers than profit, share options and being invited to parties by Sir David Frost and/or Peter Mandelson have had their fingers crossed for him ever since he took over.
Alas, the performance of the Indy under Kelner's direction has been not quite what he and his supporters - among whom can be counted the paper's proprietor, Dr (soon to be Sir Dr) Tony O'Reilly - would have wished. Since O'Reilly's Irish Independent group rescued the Independents from the clammy clutches of David Montgomery in March 1988, the one-time "must read" for the intelligentsia has found life a struggle.
The main problem, I believe, is that what was once an opinion-former - remember its heady early days - has become no more than an opinion-presenter. The Independent offers columnists by the truckload, some good, some highly indifferent, but the paper has no real voice of its own. When the Independent speaks, it has little of import to say - and nothing impresses the movers and shakers (and the general public) less than insignificance.
"It is going to be a long haul back up the cliff face," O'Reilly told me at the time he acquired what he saw as the flagships of his thriving newspaper business. "But a sale of 250,000 for the daily and 300,000 for the Sunday would make them profitable. We're at the foot of Mount Everest, looking at the peak."
Almost three years later, the foothills of the Himalayas have become disturbingly familiar. Although currently 2.3 per cent up on its six-month average of a year ago, the Independent's sales are still only 223,133. Strip away bulk copies - those seen hanging around hotel reception desks and airports with embarrassed looks on their faces - as the Guardian is now doing when recording its Audit Bureau of Circulations figures each month, and the paper's true full cover-price sales stand at 192,599. It is a pitiful figure and, if O'Reilly's calculations were correct, about as profitable as the average dotcom start-up company.
To put the Independent's predicament in perspective, it is worth recalling that Today was selling around 600,000 copies a day when Rupert Murdoch pulled the plug on it in November 1995. He did so after a shortage at the Sun had starved the far from sickly runt in the News International litter of newsprint and its print figure had been slashed through no fault of its own. Murdoch is reputed to have admitted since, privately, that he made a mistake in closing Today, but even so, he must be viewing the survival of the Independents with bewilderment.
The Sunday title is in an even more precarious position than the daily. Kelner's choice of Janet Street-Porter as editor about 20 months ago was presumably supposed to harness her high profile and experience as a priestess of popular culture to put a circulation-building fizz into the perfectly decent, but resource-starved, newspaper that Kim Fletcher had produced.
A year into her editorship, Street-Porter told me that she had given the Sindy a new identity. "The product is demonstrably better," she said, and was cheered at the time by two consecutive year-on-year circulation rises. She was hoping for a third, but this failed to materialise.
Her paper was then selling more than 250,000. Its figure for last month was 236,424, down more than 8 per cent on the previous month, although about the same as the six-monthly average of a year ago. The true figure, once bulk sales are discounted, is only 196,671.
The Sindy is now more anonymous even than its daily big brother. Street-Porter writes a take-it-or-leave-it sort of column that, personally, I would prefer to leave; and Reality magazine, the editor's own pride and joy, is pedestrian compared to some of the supplements in the competitors. There are a great many columnists, including the excellent Joan Smith, but the chattering of a cluster of bylined pontificators does not add up to one authoritative voice.
The Indies have become the industry's poor relations, to whom no one pays much heed. O'Reilly will have to dig deep into his pockets to provide the sort of editorial budgets enjoyed by rivals, and the papers themselves will have to adopt clarion calls rather than the tinkling of triangles in their leader columns, before people sit up and take notice again.
If not, can it be long before the incredible shrinking newspapers vanish totally from sight as well as mind?
