Independent Still Can’t Pay Its Debts, Gets Eyed Up By Lebedev

Like some panicked shop owner pleading with a mafia head, the Independent has been getting out of paying the interest on one of its loans for some time now. They’ve postponed the deadline for payment for a third time, but the time for finger-breaking approaches with ever greater certainty – Denis O’Brien, the second largest shareholder, has admitted the newspaper group could go into receivership. Maybe his frankness will reignite the simmering beef between him and the now-retired chief exec but still majority shareholder Tony O’Reilly? That’s always usually good for a laugh.

Anyway, amid their woes a couple of months back we wondered if Alexander Lebedev, the new owner of the Evening Standard and scorner of fellow Russian oligarchs, would try and add it to his media portfolio. And now he’s talking up the potential sale. “There are synergies”, Lebedev admitted to Media Week. “It would be interesting and we are inside the picture”. The synergies aren’t just that the Indy is another once-respected, now-ditchwater-dull English title; the two papers work out of the same building.

His previous record for brazen honesty is upheld too: “It is not [a business] for me. I bought the Standard because I am quite a curious person and money is an instrument to create things in favour of society”. Par for the course for the guy who once said: “My stocks were worth $1bn. They’re now worth $300m. OK. So what? It doesn’t make any difference to my life”, and when asked whether a case of poisoning meant he was dying, he replied: “In a sense, we are all dying”. Loving this Zen attitude, but isn’t it something of a damning indictment on the Standard and the Indy that the only person who can keep it going is someone who shrugs at loss-making and death?

The Indy really needs to get its act together editorially too – it’d be interesting to see who Lebedev would bring in. Geordie Grieg has already made the Standard look welcoming and less like a forbidding news fortress, and the content is engagingly breezy. Meanwhile a cursory glance through the Indy this Sunday threw up such hip tips as MGMT being this year’s summer soundtrack, and a piece on the future of the Republicans that was done with a darn sight more verve weeks ago by Oliver Burkeman in the Guardian. And of course there’s that near-unreadable website, which today features that reliable sign of desperation, a giant pop-up reader survey. 

But the final word on newspapers in dire straits goes to the regional press, who are being offered cut price admission to the Society of Editors’ conference this year, which was announced yesterday: “Discounts will be available recognising the special difficulties faced particularly by the regional media”. The conference is subtitled “Fighting Back”. Oh dear.

Posted by Ben Beaumont-Thomas in Creative Economy | July 28, 2009 1:45PM |