Indy celebrates 20th birthday with Indypendium special

by Sarah Woods, Brand Republic 03-Oct-06, 11:00

LONDON - The Independent newspaper is celebrating its 20th anniversary on October 7, which will be supported by a two-part 'Indypendium' book and a print advertising campaign.

The Indypendium's front page features a black background and the title "The Indypendium" above the words "a celebration of 20 years of independent journalism".

The two-volume souvenir breaks down into two decades of The Independent's coverage. The first covers the years from 1986-1995 and the second from 1996-2006. Created by Walsh Trott Chick Smith, the ad campaign features a filofax with the page open to the date October 7 1986, next to more modern personal organiser, showing the same date in 2006. At the bottom of the page is an image of The Independent paper next to the words "20 years new".

The Independent became the UK's youngest British broadsheet newspaper when it was launched by former Daily Telegraph journalists Andreas Whittam Smith, Stephen Glover and Matthew Symonds with the famous advertising slogan "It is. Are you?".

It is the only successful national newspaper to launch in the UK in recent times, while others such as Today and the Sunday Correspondent have long since bitten the dust. It challenged The Guardian for the liberal middle ground and three years after launch it was selling 400,000 copies, a long way off its current circulation of 254,854.

The holding company, Newspaper Publishing, ran into problems in the 1990s, leading to Tony O'Reilly's Independent News & Media group and what was Mirror Group Newspapers taking substantial stakes. In March 1998, O'Reilly took full control.

Whittam Smith departed in 1995 and was later succeeded by Andrew Marr, who later went on to become BBC political editor. He was succeeded by current editor Simon Kelner.

The paper was the first to go compact in September 2003, when it was published in both formats, before finally dropping the broadsheet in May 2004.

David Greene, marketing director, said: "Twenty years ago, it was widely agreed that there was no room in the market for a new quality title. We, and you, made room.

"Since then we have survived recessions and price-wars that experts insisted we had no chance of surviving: we have won prizes and set national agendas, we have reinvented ourselves in a compact format and we have repeatedly confounded doom mongers who argue that, in the age of new media and dumbed-down celebrity culture, there is no place for intelligent, original, independent-minded journalism."

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