Few journalists succeed in launching a newspaper, let alone one that survives for more than a few editions, yet Andreas Whittam Smith, who has died aged 88, managed to do so in 1986 with the Independent, the first new national broadsheet for more than a century, of which he was the founding editor. That the paper kept going (and still does, now in an online edition) owed something to Whittam Smith’s financial skills, but perhaps more to Rupert Murdoch breaking the print unions’ stranglehold over Fleet Street.
Yet Whittam Smith, an unlikely-looking figure for a journalist, with the appearance more of a high-ranking cleric than a hard-nosed editor and entrepreneur, not only saw the newspaper off the stone and on to newsstands, but also created a serious and stylish product with fine journalism and an eye-catching and innovative design that others, including the Guardian, came to emulate. It flourished among the liberal middle classes with its slogan “It Is. Are You?”, until its founders bit off more than they could chew with the launch in 1990 of a Sunday edition and the eventual loss of independence.
