Kelner: ‘Indy sales are way ahead of where we thought we would be’
The tabloid-sized Independent will be introduced outside London within weeks rather than months, according to editor Simon Kelner, writes Dominic Ponsford.
So far the two-size Indy experiment has been confined to the Greater London area. It launched on Tuesday last week with readers being given a choice between reading the same content in either a tabloid or broadsheet version.
According to Kelner, circulation figures for last week show the total Tuesday to Friday Independent sale up 25,000-a-day.
He said: “It is way ahead of where we thought we would be and we very pleased because that’s just the Greater London area. “It extrapolates to an extra 75,000 to 100,000 sales if the same increase was seen nationally.”
Buoyed by this early success, he said he now planned to offer the tabloid-sized Indy to readers in metropolitan areas outside London within a matter of weeks.
He said: “The response from readers has been amazing – we’ve had hundreds of e-mails and calls.”
When asked whether the tabloid was developing into a product in its own right, rather than just a scaled-down version of the broadsheet, he said: “Newspapers aren’t born with a personality, they develop a personality.” He added: “One of the things we are trying to do is develop the personality of the tabloid – but I don’t think anything we’ve done is unfaithful to the ethos of The Independent.
“If you have 22 news pages instead of 11, some stories that are down page in a broadsheet become page tops in a tabloid and have a bit more prominence.”
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