Evgeny Lebedev and team have not yet made a final decision but he is expected to close 30-year-old titles

The owner of the Independent and Independent on Sunday is considering stopping printing the 30 year old newspaper and moving the title online only.

Evgeny Lebedev and his lieutenants have not yet made a final decision, but the economics of continuing to print the newspaper have become increasingly strained as copy sales decline across the industry while ever more readers switch to digital.

The likely decision has been prompted by Lebedev’s decision to sell the i, the cut-price national title which provides financial support to the Independent, to Johnston Press, the owner of the Scotsman, in a £25m cash deal.

Assuming the sale of the i goes through, Lebedev is expected to seek to invest the proceeds into further developing the independent.co.uk website into an international digital news brand – while stopping printing the newspapers.

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Amol Rajan, the editor of the Independent, sent an email to staff acknowledging that there would be a “lot of questions and uncertainty”.

He offered the 150 full-time Independent and i staff, supported by casuals, little to assuage their fears of closure. “For the time being we really are bound by strict rules on what we can and can’t say about this potential deal,” he said. “I will obviously do all I can to keep everyone updated as soon as possible, within the guidelines of the law.” He thanked staff for their “understanding”.

Launched in 1985 by a group of journalists led by Andreas Whittam Smith, the Independent enjoyed initial success claiming it was free from proprietorial influence. Early advertising featured the strapline “It is, are you?”, and later editors included Andrew Marr and Rosie Boycott. However, the newspaperfaced hurdles after Rupert Murdoch launched a cover price war in the early 1990s.

Charlie Burgess, sports editor of the Independent at launch and later home and managing editor, said: “It was fantastic that the Indy lasted this long. It could have been a disaster earlier.”

The title passed into the hands of the Lebedev family who bought it from Sir Anthony O’Reilly for £1 in 2010, but it has struggled in a declining market. The Independent’s paid circulation is 40,718 while its Sunday sister title sells 42,888 copies.



It is understood that Evgeny Lebedev has unsuccessfully been seeking a buyer for the Independent titles, as he and his father did in 2014, but talks with a potential Qatari suitor fell through.



The newspapers have required heavy investment in recent years: the Lebedevs have pumped more than £111m into their British media assets up until the end of September 2014, £65m of that is thought to have been on the Independent titles.

Evgeny’s father Alexander, who has handed control of the media assets to his son, said he was not directly involved in negotiations over the i, but insisted that the Independent and Independent on Sunday both “had a future”.



He said reports that they might close were “guessing” and added there “could be different options”for the struggling titles. “If someone is interested, there is a market. This is a capitalist economy,” he told the Guardian.



Alexander Lebedev was bullish about the Independent’s prospects. Asked if it could continue, he said: “I think so. It has a future. Believe me.”

The launch of the i in 2010 was a strategic move that provided something of a lifeline for the more expensive Independent titles. The cut-price national, launched at a price of 20p, was once described by a former chief executive as a vital “rubber ring” and had been intended to make the Indy titles sustainable in the long term.

It has a circulation of a little over 200,000 paid copies and, if sold, will have its pages filled with help of Johnston Press titles such as the Yorkshire Post as well as the Scotsman.

A combination of the i, Independent and Independent on Sunday had been at almost break-even point. Heavy cost-cutting has seen a reduction in the staff on the flagship national titles to just 150 full timers.

The last publicly available figures, for the year to September 2014, show a trading loss of £4.6m. When the Lebedevs acquired the Independent and Independent on Sunday in 2010, losses were running at £22.6m.

Alex DeGroote, an analyst at Peel Hunt with a bearish view of Johnston Press’s future, said: “We are in favour of print industry consolidation,” he said. “However, we are confused by Johnston Press’s business strategy as a regional publisher, which has focused on paring back print, in favour of digital.”

Johnston Press said that in the year to the end of September 2015, the i had an “unaudited carve-out” operating profit of £5.2m. The figure is the first time an independent assessment of the profitability of the i has been made public.

It had widely been considered almost impossible to unpick the operation of the i from the Independent and Independent on Sunday, due to huge editorial and commercial codependency and shared resources between the titles.

The website is held in a separate company to the Independent print titles, which means it is ringfenced from the impact of any decision to close the titles. The company that controls the website has just two directors, Evgeny Lebedev and his associate Justin Byam Shaw.

Arguably the newspapers’ most valuable asset, it has 2.8m daily unique browsers and 58m monthly uniques, making it a relative minnow in comparison with some of its rivals.



Lebedev is understood to remain committed to the Evening Standard, which makes about £2m in profits. He is also continuing to back London Live, the local TV channel for the capital, which reported a loss of £6m in the year to the end of September.

Johnston Press, which has 220 local and regional titles, believes that owning the i will help it attract a greater share of national advertising and create the UK’s fourth largest print publisher with more than 600,000 sales per day.

News of the deal comes weeks after chief executive Ashley Highfield, the former senior BBC and Microsoft executive, announced sweeping plans to sell less desirable titles to focus on the group’s “gems”.



While titles such as the Scotsman and Yorkshire Post have a future, those that do not fit certain criteria, such as titles that serve wealthier readers with “more disposable income”, are to be offered for sale to rivals.

Johnston Press has been in a financially difficult situation since the downturn. When Highfield joined in 2011, the company was struggling with a debt burden of almost £400m. It has since reduced this to £180m, on profits of £56m and revenues of £247m.