The good news, widely proclaimed, is that the Independent has gained millions of readers since it disappeared from newsstands and turned online-only. That’s 42% up year-on-year, more than 6 million readers – progress worth hymning in a Digiday article for the ad trade.
And the less good, more nuanced, news comes as Scott Deutrom, the Indy’s chief revenue officer, adds his own gloss. “There is obviously a price to pay with extended reach. We invest a lot in news generation, and the cost of that will only increase. When our audience starts to cap out and the global reach starts to slow, or goes even more to mobile and via Facebook Instant Articles, it may become unsustainable.
“We will need to understand where that inflection point is – where it becomes ineffective for us because the yields won’t be high enough. And currently it’s not wiping its face.”
You won’t find a terser explanation of the problem that dogs all news online than that. Many big, buoyant numbers: but they don’t add up yet.
■ Guardian staff sorrow when Ian Traynor died felt palpable. Ian, the paper’s Europe editor, was only 60, but he was already an iconic correspondent to those he worked with. He’d seen so much – from bases in Vienna, Bonn, Berlin, Moscow, Zagreb and Brussels – over the last 27 years; but he’d also learned so much along that way.
Ian wasn’t some didactic warrior on one side of the argument. His finest gift was understanding. He understood the nations and tensions on his beat. He had an uncanny way of seeing how things – human things, European things – would work out. It’s tragic that such understanding has gone, just as we need it most through the years of negotiation and fulmination ahead.
Europe can’t be understood from a cheap seat in the Westminster lobby, or on flying visits to Brussels. Europe needs the deep, devoted immersion of brilliant journalism. Providing that is the most immediately important job any British foreign correspondent could wish for.
■ Listen to anxious journalists ask a basic question: Is there any finite limit to the cuts that come and come again? Then turn to the Columbia Journalism Review for a definitive answer, as supplied when Suzanne Ashe from Anchorage, Alaska, got a new job 500 miles away on the biweekly Skagway News. “As the editor/reporter,” her job description said “you will be responsible for writing every story, laying out every issue, sending it to the printers and picking it up in Whitehorse, two hours away. You and our business manager are also responsible for distributing the papers throughout town and mailing them to the Lower 48.”
It’s what you might call total integration. They didn’t mention Uber or delivering pizzas, but I guess you could fit it in.
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