Profile: The Independent reader

If there’s one thing that people alighting on this page hate, it’s being generalised. But here goes anyway

"I was learning more from the readers than I was telling them"

The blood had hardly dried on the streets of Paris when the postman arrived at The Independent’s original offices in London’s City Road with a mailbag which took Andreas Whittam Smith by surprise.

The paper’s founding editor was only weeks into his role but had formed a clear picture of his clientele. The Independent reader was young (reflecting the average age of 31 of the editorial staff), fascinated by foreign affairs and ready to be challenged by photography. Whittam Smith would show this reader exactly how the world had become in 1986, by publishing a large front-page image of the corpse of Renault chief executive Georges Besse, gunned down outside his home by Maoist terrorists.

But the Independent reader, at that point in its young life, was not quite who the editor imagined. “I was saying, ‘This is what life is like now in a place like Paris or London; people get shot in the street and blood pours across the pavement’,” he recalls. “Hundreds of critical letters flooded in. I knew I’d made a big mistake.” The response was: “Don’t you understand we look at this paper at breakfast?”

Nearly 30 years later, in a world where terror is a constant menace, the Independent print reader now accepts and applauds the paper’s scenes of modern atrocities on Paris’s streets. It fully understood the motives for publication of a front page picture of a dead little boy, Alan Kurdi, drowned on a Turkish shore. Amol Rajan, the current and last editor of the printed paper, says such coverage “went down well” with a readership that has grown “deeply sensitive to injustice”. Research found that 79 per cent of readers thought the coverage of Alan’s death was “the right thing to do”.

Despite this apparent evolution, many character traits of the Independent reader have never wavered. Certainly, the defining gene has been there throughout a 30-year life span.

Introduced during the paper’s gestation by the brilliant advertising creative Paul Arden, the launch slogan “It Is. Are You?” represented an irresistible challenge to 1980s newspaper readers frustrated by powerful media owners and the confines of two-party politics.

The first Independent readers wore the slogan on badges. The paper became almost a fashion garment. “You would see young people carrying The Independent. It was a statement about them that they wanted other people to know,” says Stephen Glover, another of the paper’s founders. “What seemed to unite those readers was that they were reading a paper that wasn’t going to shove a line down their throats.”

But that youthful self-confidence became challenged by harsh economic realities. The open-mindedness of the Independent reader was misrepresented by jealous competitors as eccentricity and inconsistency. When Mirror Group bought a stake in the paper, it found the Indy reader an enigma, offering ill-thought-out enticements of sports cars as prizes.

But Ian Hargreaves, who took the editor’s chair in 1994, admires how this reader moved with the times, supporting writers in pushing boundaries in the growing debate on sexuality. There was also great interest in technological advances. “The emergence of the internet – then a relatively geeky thing – was of growing fascination,” he says.

When Andrew Marr became editor in 1996, he was struck by reader engagement with the groundbreaking coverage of the roots of Islamic terrorism. “It got very fast and strong reactions, often from people who had been Foreign Office employees in the Middle East, who were scholars of Islam,” he says. “I was learning more from the readers than I was telling them.”

It was at this time that the Indy reader showed another defining quality: loyalty. With Rupert Murdoch using predatory pricing of The Times to threaten the young paper’s existence, Indy readers working in the City and in senior civil service roles wrote to Marr to express solidarity. “We may not have had the big guns or the lowest price but we had the best readers,” he recalls. “They understood exactly what was going on.”

To Rosie Boycott, editor in 1998, the Indy reader had the “incredibly curious” open-mindedness that she saw in visitors to the Hay Festival. (Hargreaves, formerly head of BBC News, identified a shared culture between Indy readers and BBC Radio 4 listeners.)

Jon O’Donnell, the commercial director, saw that advertisers were drawn in by the chance to talk to readers “who are strong opinion formers and highly influential among their peer group. As you’d expect they are well educated and almost all are in full time employment. However, they’re also more likely to spend more money on fashion than the UK average .... When the world zigs, they zag,” he said.

Simon Kelner, the longest-serving editor, learned to avoid “single characterisation” of the readers after taking the paper to a compact format in 2003. One arthritis sufferer wrote to complain that “turning all these pages is painful for me”. Another with the same condition wrote to offer congratulations, adding that “a tabloid paper is much easier to handle”.

Kelner made the paper known for eye-catching front pages, which helped to dispel the myth that the Indy reader was a dullard. “The original Indy reader was regarded as quite grey, and Private Eye called the paper “The Indescribablyboring”, but some people thought our paper was too lively,” he says. “Independent readers had a conscience about what they would buy but it wouldn’t stop them enjoying themselves.”

Tony Blair’s “feral beast” attack in 2007, when he accused the paper of merging news and views, was another slur on the Indy reader, says Kelner. “I don’t think I ever had more than half a dozen letters complaining about that because our readers were intelligent enough to work out what was news and what was comment.”

The paper’s opposition to the Iraq War and its coverage of environmental issues had a profound effect on the readership, says Roger Alton, who became editor in 2008. He says the audience “became more polarised to a specific agenda” as the paper fought for identity. By 2011, when Chris Blackhurst became editor, his reader was “extremely well read”, “well travelled in a literary way” and had a well-developed world view. “If you contradicted that, they weren’t afraid of letting you know,” he says. They were also “disparaging about bling and celebrity”, which meant they embraced the paper’s disinterest in the monarchy, he says.

The modern Indy reader lists climate change as a major concern, is overwhelmingly against Brexit and backs Hillary Clinton for the US presidency. A hefty 38 per cent support the Labour Party, although there is also strong sympathy with Liberal Democrat values.

But Andrew Mullins, a former managing director of The Independent, warns that “they weren’t as obsessed about Europe, the environment or liberal issues as some of the classic Indy front pages or promotions would have suggested”. Creators of their own wealth, they’re less likely than Guardian readers to be “dependent on government spending”, he says. They also “hated being generalised”.

So this attempt to describe the Indy person should be treated with the same healthy scepticism which all editors have come to recognise. Marr had to recalibrate his opinion after attending a readers’ focus group. One shaven-headed and tattooed figure with a career in the prison service was regarded by Marr as a probable fan of the Daily Express, but shocked him with the words: “I’m an Independent reader myself. I really like their views on social affairs.”

As Whittam Smith observes, there has been only one qualification for admission. “You can be any age – you can be any profile but the key is that you are independent minded.”