A 25-year adventure: The Independent celebrates a quarter of a century
Andreas Whittam Smith
On its 25th birthday, The Independent faces the future with just the same mixture of optimism and understandable worries as when the first issue appeared. It's been like that all the way along. But when the newspaper was launched, our apprehension was of a special kind. For starting a new business is an act of faith as well as calculation. The outcome of what I call the entrepreneurial leap is simply unknowable. It doesn't matter how much research you have done, how excellent the team is that has been assembled, how many trial runs you have conducted: you still have no idea where you will land.
We sold more than 700,000 copies on the first day. We had had the benefit of a brilliant advertising campaign devised by Saatchi's. And many people were curious to see what a new quality newspaper would be like. That much was predictable. But what would be the circulation on the second day? Where would we be in a month? At what level would we settle down? When would that be? Nobody could say. In the event, we found a base from which we could build shortly before Christmas 1986. After that, everything was a bit more predictable.
Pour citer cette ressource :
"A 25-year adventure: The Independent celebrates a quarter of a century", La Clé des Langues [en ligne], Lyon, ENS de LYON/DGESCO (ISSN 2107-7029), juillet 2011. Consulté le 30/09/2023. URL: https://cle.ens-lyon.fr/anglais/archives/archives-revue-de-presse/a-25-year-adventure-the-independent-celebrates-a-quarter-of-a-century