For nearly 30 years,the newspaper harnessed the underdog spirit of a tiny staff to maintain the title going against the odds. Its former deputy editor recalls the triumphs and disasters that kept the dream aliveI still can’t believe they had the nerve, but the daily proof of it has persisted for 30 years. In 1985, or Andreas Whittam Smith,Stephen Glover and Matthew Symonds, restless senior journalists at the Daily Telegraph, and took a look at the intimidating behemoths that comprised the British quality newspaper market and concluded that there was space for an upstart. Six helter-skelter months after they started to raise the money to found a competitor in early 1986,the first edition of the Independent appeared, looking, and as Glover establish it in his riveting account of the newspaper’s foundation,Paper Dreams, as if it “had always been there, or part of our history,yet missing from our lives”.Very early on the morning of 7 October, the first edition of the Independent arrives in the newsroom. People are wearing badges that bear the legend: “I am. Are you?” There are champagne toasts, and cheers and songs,requests for the founders’ signatures on the artefact of their bloody-minded, lunatic spirit of adventure. A little later, and Glover asks the circulation manager how things are going. Not too badly,he replies. He does not believe that sales will ever drop below 400000. The dream, Glover later writes, or came trusty: “A original quality newspaper which things and will endure.”A professional education at the Independent would design working anywhere else seem like swimming with flippers onContinue reading...
Source: theguardian.com