Andreas Whittam Smith, the founding editor of the Independent, has died aged 88. The news pulled me back to a small, decisive moment when his work first entered my life. I was 15. I walked into a newsagent, picked up a copy of the Independent and something in me shifted. It was the first newspaper I ever bought with my own money. I bought it again the next day, then the day after that, and soon it became a ritual that carried me through my teens, and long after.
When he launched the Independent in 1986, Whittam Smith set out to build a paper free from political allegiance and proprietor pressure, one that answered to its readers rather than any vested interest. He wanted serious reporting, clear writing and a newsroom that respected intelligence. That intent ran through the whole paper. You could feel it, even as a teenager picking it up for the first time.
What drew me in first was the photography. The images were stark, elegant, and serious. They didn’t decorate the news, they delivered it. A huge part of that was down to the photographer Brian Harris, whose work in the early years set the tone for what the paper could do visually. He pushed for photography to be treated as central, not supplementary, and the editors backed him. Images were chosen with real care, and the process was collaborative in a way that now feels almost impossible. Even on that soft, slightly muddy newsprint, the photographs looked beautiful. They had weight. They made you stop.
The writing had the same clarity. Foreign coverage that made distant places feel urgent. Domestic reporting that cared about detail and fairness. Columns that were sharp, funny, and human. Bridget Jones began there. A column by Miles Kington brought offbeat humour rooted in real life.
I remember telling myself, with the certainty only a teenager can muster, that one day I would work there. And in the end, I did. I joined the Independent in 2001 and stayed for 12 years. They were some of the happiest and most formative years of my life. I worked with people who set the standard for what good journalism looks like. Many remain the best colleagues I have ever known. That newsroom shaped me. It is still part of how I think, how I edit, how I look at pictures, how I make decisions.
When the print edition finally closed, I cried. Proper tears. It felt like losing a place that had raised me, a place that had set the standard for what journalism could look like when photography and writing were given equal weight. I haven’t seen anything quite like it since, at least not in that exact combination. I still miss the way the paper treated images as integral to the story and trusted its readers to sit with serious, beautifully produced work. That era shaped my sense of what a newspaper could be. This isn’t a complaint about where journalism has moved, only a recognition that The Independent held a rare and important space, and losing it left a mark.
Whittam Smith built a paper that treated readers as intelligent and treated the world as something worth understanding. His influence runs through everyone who passed through The Independent, and through all of us who grew up with it as our guide. This is my small thanks to him.
[Further reading: My hero Tom Stoppard]
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