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The Sunday Independent is dead - the liberal media establishment the only mourners, I celebrate

Tom Winnifrith
Sunday 20 March 2016

On the Marr show sat two journalists & a politico being interviewed by a fourth (Marr himself). They gazed at the front cover of the print edtion of the Independent on Sunday and agreed how sad they were about its demise. For today I feel that I deserve a glass of champagne for this is the last ever print edition. Hooray.
Marr, who once edited the Independent before heading off to another left wing financial black hole, that is to say the BBC, said that viewing an online edition would just not be the same. Nope that is correct.

The reality is that very few people read the Sindy. It offers the commodity product that is news plus stories pinched from others ( the business section has taken our material) without attribution and left wing columnists ranting about an agenda that few outside the metropolitan elite care about. And its mad left wing columnists are just not as good as the mad left wing columnists on The Guardian. The paper thus did not have enough readers to be viable offline.

Will it survive online with much lower fixed costs? For a while it will. But in due course folks will forget that it was once a newspaper. Ad rates will reflect that it is just "another blog" and while its "journalists" may sneer at all folks writig online as "bloggers" that is not how readers will view the new order.

Over the past few years it has been professional writers operating online, uber-bloggers, that have broken all the big stories and that have dared to act as a 4th Estate should, in challenging the status quo. We bloggers look down on the "journalists" of the deadwood press who regarded themselves as superior but were in most cases, lazy and corrupt. And in all cases overpaid.

The number of folks reading a useless me-too online blog like the Indy and Sindy will continue to decline. Its death is not cancelled merely postponed. The metropolitan elite of the media and politiacl world may mourn its passing. Lobbyists and PR folks and their clients in the political and corporate elite, will lament the loss of a place to plant stories with journalists who asked no questions as they showed pathetic gratitude for a rare scoop.

As for the other 99% of the poulation they either just dont care or see it as part of a changing of the guard, a welcome day.

The sooner the Indy and Sindy are killed off, the quicker its remaining ad revenues can be shared out among the vibrant, uncorrupt part of the media world that is not steeped in the merde of corruption that is Fleet Street and the establishment.  The online revolution continues, all power to the insurgents.

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About Tom Winnifrith
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Tom Winnifrith is the editor of TomWinnifrith.com. When he is not harvesting olives in Greece, he is (planning to) raise goats in Wales.
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