Paul Alkazraji's Blog - Posts Tagged "saltaire"

Back at The Independent

One broadsheet edition I kept from 2003.

‘It is. Are you?’ read The Independent’s posters on its launch in 1986, and I remember staring curiously at one that year emblazoned on a footbridge at Bournemouth railway station. Whilst chatting to a publisher on the phone this spring about changes in the industry, he brought up the subject of the March end of The Independent in print.

When The Indy began, there was no worldwide web, and all news journalism is being turned upside down by the digital revolution. At its peak, it had a circulation of around 400,000, but had since languished to a print readership of 56,000. “There, but for the grace of the digital gods, go all of us,” wrote a Guardian comment piece.

In the Nineties, I became an enthusiastic reader of the print edition. Styled on ‘Picture Post’, the Saturday Magazine sparked in me an interest in photojournalism which remains. In my mind’s eye, I can still see one strangely wonderful feature on a dog osteopath. As a huge German Shepherd was having its vertebrae realigned its tongue lolled out with an expression of blissful relief.

For freelancers, The Independent presented opportunities to new writers across considerable column inches, which I summoned up the ‘chutzpah’ to try for. There was the brief written pitch, and the nerve-racking follow-through call to the editor, which sometimes ended in moments of elation - the air-punching satisfaction of acceptance - and later a glowing pride at seeing work there.

For me, it became a run of ten features in the travel section: 48 Hours in Munich, The Oldest Curry House in Bradford, a piece on Saltaire, ‘Not Much Trouble at Mill’, and another on the Taizé Community in France with a huge black and white image I’d shot - Picture Post style.

I learnt then an important lesson in topicality: the ‘why now?’ question all news editors ask. A feature I’d written on film locations in San Francisco had been languishing in an in-tray, but was swiftly run after an email tip-off I sent them that ‘Vertigo’ was being screened in a central London cinema. I punched the air one more time that day.

“Can’t you offer a more committed arrangement?” I once asked an editor there. Towards the end of that time, he asked me for a meeting at Bristol’s ‘Watershed’ to talk about being ‘retained’. By then, though, my own writing was moving in a different direction, and I did not go.

Over dinner with the publisher in Wiltshire this month, an unusual privilege for a writer, we chatted again about The Independent and how publishing has changed. The Evening Standard is now free at London stations, he noted; Google is creating an expectation of free content; it’s not easy even for the larger publishers. He too was seeking new models of operation, and the traditional deals he once offered may well be fewer.

Back at The Independent, the remaining tabloid ‘i’ has been sold off to the owners of The Scotsman and The Yorkshire Post. It will function solely now as a website and an app. ‘It is… hardly. Are you?’ might be a suitable epigram sprayed on that footbridge at Bournemouth railway station.

So long The Independent in print… and thanks for all the creative flair, opportunity and inspiration. You’ll be missed.