I could start this talking about how I bought the first edition of The Independent in 1986, and how for years I read it pretty religiously – if not exclusively.
These days, I’m more of a Guardian man, still buying paper editions of it and its Sunday stablemate every day without fail. I still like The Independent, although I’ve not been a fan of the direction it’s gone with its issues based agenda.
Anyway, today publisher Alexander Lebedev launched a younger version of the paper – i. Since Lebedev took the London Evening Standard free just over a year ago, the rumours have abounded about what he might do with The Independent. The Standard seems to be doing quite well, no longer having free competition, and genuinely offering something to read on the way home (where its main competition is commuters’ smartphones, where email is read and games of the Angry Bird variety are assiduously played).
But the Standard had the advantage of reaching many readers in the centre of London meaning that a relatively small distribution team is able to handout the 600,000 or so papers it prints each day. The quid pro quo is that newsagent sales outside Zone One (the centre of the city) have disappeared. It’s not economical to distribute tens of papers to hundreds of locations. Indeed while the paper was initially available in a select number of supermarkets, I’m not sure that this is the case any longer, and I can find no mention on their website of availability beyond the distribution team.
The Independent has a tougher problem should it go down the free route. Its sales are national, picking up handfuls here and there. As a consequence simply giving away the paper isn’t easy to do without either continuing to charge some readers, or cutting them off altogether.
The route they’ve chosen is to launch “i”, a cut-down version of The Independent priced at just 20p, but still distributed through newsagents.
As a product, it’s clearly led to a large extent by Metro – the audience that they’re chasing. It’s bright and breezy, but a bit more intelligent than Metro, with an editorial line that obviously shares the liberal sensibilities of its older sibling. The problem is that it costs 20p. I don’t mean that the audience it’s targeting can’t afford 20p, or won’t pay 20p to read it. The problem is that we’re talking about a new kind of commuter who doesn’t walk into the newsagent in the morning. They walk into Starbucks. They read Metro because it’s there. It’s in the dump bin at their station.
Metro built its national distribution in a piecemeal manner, and perhaps launching a new national freesheet from the outset had too many distribution issues. But you can’t help but wonder if making the paper paid is in their long term plan, or whether it’s more a stop-gap until they can get teams in place.
The marketing press claimed that many papers would be handed out free to drive awareness of the paper in the first couple of weeks. However outside Oxford Circus station this morning, vendors were selling the paper for 20p. This is something that News International has tried with The Sun and The Times over time – although I do wonder whether vendors have to spend more time explaining that you have to part with cash than sell the paper, since commuters are now used to getting things free from Metro and the Evening Standard, to Stylist, Shortlist and Sport.
What’s the paper like itself? Well I was surprised to see how different it was from The Independent. Comparing stories, the Indy takes a much more serious approach, and today at least, there wasn’t an enormous amount shared. Much of what was shared has been subbed down in “i”. But the major feature on Mel Gibson is present in both papers. Sometimes the “i” version of a story is actually improved: a story about the Chilean miners playing a game of football had nicer photos in “i” than in the Indy. But for the most part, “i” is a subset of The Independent.
One area where this is less the case is in sport, where both titles are pretty decent. It feels as though more sport, and in more detail, has been carried over from the Indy. That’s a good thing, as Metro is decidedly poor at sport.

The one area that’s not right in my mind is the TV guide. I know we all have EPGs on our sets theoretically making TV guides redundant, but actually you need more help not less, when there are hundreds of channels to surf through. “i” breaks down TV into genres and points you to different programmes dependent on what type of programming you want to watch. While I want to be directed to interesting programmes, I still in the main, want listings in a easy to read manner. That’s what the Independent offers. “i” relegates listings to a tiny area at the foot of a double-page spread. Both titles share Tim Walker’s TV review column which is good.
(As a radio person, I should note that “i” makes no mention of radio at all, whereas the Indy carries listings of the BBC national services alone, and a Radio Choice highlighting four programmes which is, at least, better than nothing!)
In summary, not a bad effort at all, although I can’t see the paper really gaining ground until it’s free and distributed in commuter-friendly places. I can’t see myself wanting to buy the cut-down version of the full product, even when it’s only one fifth the price. While price might be an issue the cut-throat world of tabloids (although even there, I’m not sure to what extent it’s the driving force), I’m unconvinced that this is the case amongst what we used to call broadsheets. Even Murdoch’s Times is priced in line with its “broadsheet” peers these days.