Member

While reading the obituaries of Sir Andreas Whittam Smith, who died recently, I was struck that they underlined the difficulty of newspaper ownership and finance, not just during the years of his career but today. In 1986, he and others set out to do something uncharted by setting up a newspaper, the Independent, and trying to free it from proprietorial control and setting up a new management structure. That is easier said than done, as they found out. Within a decade, that newspaper had to restructure financially and indeed is now owned by the noble Lord, Lord Lebedev, and a Saudi businessman, Sultan Muhammad Abuljadayel, in a process which itself was subject to a public interest intervention notice.