Inde to the end

It's appropriate that the passing of any newspaper should be mourned. But, in the case of the now online-only Independent, the eulogy should be a positive one.

Launched in the frenzied days of what was then called the newspaper revolution ( a rather hopeful euphemism for journalists being able to publish without asking print unions permission), it stood aloft for both standing by its founding principle and staying the course for three decades.

Oh how the other revolutionaries would have coveted such an achievement: Today (nine years), the Sunday Correspondent (14 months), the London Daily News (six months), the News on Sunday (eight months), the European (eight years) would surely loved to have seen the dawning of another day.

Big names were built on those papers as the hitherto hard-to-breach wall that was Fleet Street opened up a wealth of opportunity to provincial wannabes ( me included) who arrived and moved from on as one paper closed, knowing another would be opening sometime soon and, besides, you were eminently employable anyway because the established ones were still waking up to new technology (such as it was) and in need of your so-called skills.

The Inde stood apart because it deserved to. As a sub, I'd be among those who ridiculed the wordiness, the pomposity and the indulgence of those early editions but it excelled in the bigger picture by doing what great newspapers do - marking their territory.

This eulogy has many contributors but I was struck by one this afternoon. Eddie Shah, the man who started it all with the launch of Today, described it as the paper he would love to have launched.

Many of us who joined him in that adventure thought it was. The so-called independent voice we had been sold at our interviews was sold within xxx to Tiny Rowland's Lonhro - and quickly became the voice of the Lib-Dems, a fact most of us only discovered when we went went upstairs for an early view of the latest ad campaign !