The Independent hasn’t died, it has merely changed its form

Our newsagents are about to get a little duller: the Independent is no more – at least, not the print edition. I know that, in this brave new digital world of ours, we’re not supposed to equate the end of print with the death of a title. But it’s certainly the end of an era. The Independent is what brought me into journalism: I started reading it when it was set up, and was hooked pretty quickly. My first journalistic heroes—Andrew Marr and Neal Ascherson—wrote for its pages. A friend bought me Paper Dreams, Stephen Glover’s story of the Independent, for my 20th birthday. I had no friends or relatives in journalism, but that book opened a portal into this world – and I was converted; I decided that this was what I wanted to do with my life. I succeeded in getting work experience at the Independent in 1996, which was great because even then it had no staff and the interns got to write in the paper.