Farewell, Independent on Sunday

On Tuesday the Culture Secretary Maria Miller announced to a breathless world the latest development in the Leveson saga. The government wants a royal charter to oversee a new press watchdog. I say ‘the government’, but the Liberal Democrats are only half on board. Like Labour, they seem still to hanker after some sort of statute to set Leveson in stone. As for Hacked Off, the celebrity-backed pressure group that has campaigned for greater press regulation, it will settle for nothing less than a statute, and wants every recommendation made by Lord Justice Leveson to be implemented without delay.

On the day Mrs Miller did her little turn in the Commons, a once successful Sunday newspaper was closed. Almost no one noticed. This may have been because the newspaper in question, the Independent on Sunday, is now selling so few copies (58,809 full-price sales per issue last month) that not many people are likely to get worked up about its demise. It is also true that its closure was not represented as such by its owners (the Russian oligarch Alexander Lebedev, and his son Evgeny) or management. A murky and obfuscating statement was issued such as might have emerged from an ailing Soviet tractor factory with production problems in the days when Alexander Lebedev was serving as a young KGB officer. There would be ‘a programme that commences a complete restructuring of the way we intend to create and publish our content’.

The Independent on Sunday will admittedly continue in name. That is to say, there will be a seventh-day version of the Independent. But it will have no staff of its own, and no editor. Bean counters have long advocated sharing journalists on Sunday and daily titles to save costs, but this is not so much an integration as an annihilation.