Why not merge the London Evening Standard and the Independent to create a single, 24-hour newspaper?
Evgeny Lebedev gets all the best jobs. First he gets to appoint a new editor of the Independent – Chris Blackhurst; now, after an interesting month behind the scenes, Sarah Sands has become editor of the London Evening Standard. One might have thought this was an easy bit of elevation, but it seems Sands, underwhelmed with Evgeny's desire to take his time, told him she would quit and join the Standard's outgoing editor, Geordie Greig, at the Mail on Sunday. Suddenly the younger Lebedev had to move more quickly, although he was still eager to contact some influential Londoners to see what they thought, which is either admirably consultative, or leaves the proprietor open to suggestions of external manipulation.
It is five weeks before a mayoral election, so the fact that the London mayor, Boris Johnson, is an unashamed Sands fan could not have gone unnoticed. He had the chance, on a visit to the paper's office on 7 March, to press his case in person; Sands is close to his wife, Marina, and used to edit, or handle, Johnson's column at the Daily Telegraph. This sort of closeness might attract the interest of Lord Justice Leveson's third module (the juicy one with Cameron and Blair), although it does not give Sands's long experience as a senior editor and journalist much credit if you simply believe that friendship with the mayor makes her his stooge. Sands is clearly qualified, and nobody should assume that Johnson has been a great hit with the Lebedevs. An ill-judged joke he made about the KGB is not understood to have helped relations.
Increasingly, party politics can be overrated in journalism: the future for newspapers lies less in slavish loyalty than in getting closer to readers and developing fresh commercial and digital strategies. The decision to take the Standard free after acquiring it from the Rothermeres was a near masterstroke, turning a title that lost north of £20m a year into a paper that is almost profitable. But this is not the moment to sit back, even if there is Olympics gold coming: nearly profitable may not be enough for the owners in 2013 because there are losses elsewhere.
No doubt the Lebedevs have deep pockets, with their mix of Aeroflot stakes and potato farms, but the Independent is running up losses of £20m a year. Its full-rate sales hover at 70,000 in a sharply declining quality print market, and while the i provides a second outlet, its 20p price means its 207,000 sales generate modest revenues. That may not matter if the family want to write cheques, but losing money is not always fun.
One dismal (but perhaps necessary) option could be to more tightly integrate the Standard and the Independent. A merger of sorts has been tried with the sports and the business desks, and this appears to be working. Why not go further, rationalising operations in news? Why not create a single 24-hour paper: paid-for in the morning but free in the afternoon? Or does the appointment of a new editor mean this sort of thinking is off the agenda? We shall see.
Digital, too, can't be ducked. Perhaps it is too late, but it seems extraordinary that no low-cost, scrappy new entrant type operation has turned up and taken on old Fleet Street. Surely the Mail (in the No 1 spot), Guardian (2), Telegraph (3) pattern is not perpetually entrenched. Certainly both the Independent (622,000 daily uniques) and above all the Standard (160,000 daily uniques) could do something different, maybe with a heavy emphasis on liveblogs, which is where the readers are.
Editorial clearly matters (well, you are reading this still) but having the best stories and the most gregarious editors is simply not enough in the next decade. Whenever the Standard or Independent has done well, it is by upending conventional thinking. Sympathy, or otherwise, from mayors is barely relevant.