Independent-owner Evgeny Lebedev's in a letter to staff: "At a time when our journalism is read and respected by more people in more places than ever before, we are embracing an exclusively digital future with independent.co.uk and its associated sites. We faced a choice: manage the continued decline of print, or convert the digital foundation we’ve built into a sustainable, profitable future...I can now confirm we are selling The Independent’s sister paper, i, to Johnston Press, subject to Johnston Press shareholder approval. In addition, we will cease to print The Independent and Independent on Sunday. The Independent’s last edition is expected to be on Saturday 26th March and the last Independent on Sunday is expected be on Sunday 20th March."
Michelle Stanistreet, NUJ general secretary, in a statement: "To close these historic titles overnight after a deal clinched behind closed doors, without any consultation or attempts to engage with staff, demonstrates the contempt the company has for its workforce. For Evgeny Lebedev to laud closures that will see staff lose their livelihoods as an ‘historic transition’ is an added indignity. The fact that our national newspapers can be shut down overnight with no scrutiny and no ability for their future to be secured through other means, underlines the moral bankruptcy of newspaper ownership in the UK. That needs to be urgently addressed."
Ian Katz @iankatz1000 on Twitter: "Independent co-founder Stephen Glover predicts FT and Guardian likely to follow Indy and abandon print edition in next few years #newsnight."
Raymond Snoddy @RaymondSnoddy on Twitter: "Alas fear I now understand sale of the i to Johnston Press - end of the road for The Independent as a paper publication - online oblivion?"
Daniel Finkelstein in The Times [£] on the prosecution of the Sun's Fergus Shanahan:"It isn’t clear even now, a year after his acquittal, whether the things that Fergus stark-staringly obviously didn’t do were actually illegal even if he had done them. So how on earth did it end with him in the dock, as he put it, 'like Don Corleone', and me watching? The answer is the same in his and Lord Bramall’s case. It happened because the police and prosecuting authorities were protecting themselves against public criticism. Phone hacking is in the news, we’d better prosecute a journalist. VIP sex abuse is in the news, we’d better get a celebrity or two in the dock. It was 'justice' for the purposes of spin and defensive briefing."
Dominic Ponsford in Press Gazette, following the judgment of the Investigatory Powers Tribunal to reject a compensation claim by a Sun journalist whose phone records were illegally seized by police: "So if a journalist illegally listens to the voicemails of a celebrity they can expect dawn raids, years on bail, an Old Bailey trial and a stretch in Belmarsh. If a cop illegally accesses a journalists' mobile phone data to identify their confidential sources, driving a coach and horses through Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, the punishment is nothing."
Man United manager Louis van Gaal meets the press, as reported by the Mirror: "You are creating stories. You haven't spoken with Ed Woodward or the Glazers and you are inventing the story. Then I have to answer that question. I don't answer this question and I shall repeat myself every week. I have to say that you are getting the sack tomorrow. What is your name? Then I can announce the name also. Look at your wife - maybe you have children, or a nephew or something like that."
Lucy Kellaway in the Financial Times in an open letter to Henry Gomez, head of marketing and communications at Hewlett Packard Enterprise: "You say the FT management should think about 'unacceptable biases' and its relationship with its advertisers. My piece was not biased and I fear you misunderstand our business model. It is my editors’ steadfast refusal to consider the impact of stories on advertisers that makes us the decent newspaper we are. It is why I want to go on working here. It is why the FT goes on paying me."
Jeremy Lewis in the Observer on the paper's former editor David Astor: "He also preferred employing writers rather than professional journalists, whom he referred to as 'plumbers', a proclivity that eventually brought him into conflict with the National Union of Journalists."
Croydon Advertiser reports: "A JUDGE has granted Croydon Advertiser chief reporter Gareth Davies permission for a judicial review of the police watchdog's decision to uphold the harassment warning issued to him for questioning a convicted criminal. After considering submissions from Mr Davies, backed by Advertiser publisher Local World, and the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC), Mr Justice Picken, of the Queen's Bench Division of the High Court of Justice, ruled the claim is arguable."
The Guardian reports: "The former cabinet minister Jack Straw, who has been tasked with considering how to tighten up the Freedom of Information Act, led two of the Whitehall departments most likely to reject public requests for information. Straw’s ministries never ranked higher than 15 out of 21 government departments in terms of releasing information in full, according to a Guardian analysis."
The late Mirror journalist Garth Gibbs, quoted by Roy Greenslade in the Guardian: "I regard not finding Lord Lucan as my most spectacular success in journalism. Of course, many of my colleagues have also been fairly successful in not finding Lord Lucan. But I have successfully not found him in more exotic spots than anybody else.”
When Garth died in 2011 an obit it Press Gazette included the same quote, which continued: "I spent three glorious weeks not finding him in Cape Town, magical days and nights not finding him in the Black Mountains of Wales, and wonderful and successful short breaks not finding him in Macau either, or in Hong Kong or even in Green Turtle Cay in the Bahamas where you can find anyone."
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