Mitchell Steph­ens in the Columbia Journ­al­ism Review has seen the future of journ­al­ism. It’s the Inde­pend­ent:

The Inde­pend­ent is a ser­i­ous Eng­lish national daily in a mar­ket with three other ser­i­ous national dailies. So the Inde­pend­ent, look­ing for an edge, has begun devot­ing most of its front page, weekly­like, to a single story — a story covered with con­sid­er­able per­spect­ive and depth, a story in which the paper is not shy about exhib­it­ing a point of view. The Inde­pend­ent weighed in recently, for example, on the debate on global warm­ing with this head­line, and a pic­ture of a large wave, dom­in­at­ing its front page: “Tsunami hits Bri­tain: 5 novem­ber 2060.”

Simon Kel­ner, the paper’s editor in chief, explains that his under­stand­ing of the situ­ation of the daily news­pa­per “crys­tal­lized” dur­ing cov­er­age in Eng­land of the Amer­ican pres­id­en­tial elec­tion in 2004. The Inde­pend­ent repor­ted and inter­preted the res­ults along with the other papers. “It was a really expens­ive, exhaust­ive exer­cise for us all,” Kel­ner recalls. Yet the next morn­ing news­stand cir­cu­la­tion actu­ally fell. For up-to-the-minute res­ults people had turned instead to the radio, tele­vi­sion, and the Inter­net. How­ever, he explains, “The next day the Inde­pend­ent pub­lished twenty-one pages of ana­lysis and inter­pret­a­tion of the elec­tion — and we put on fif­teen per­cent in sales.”

Kel­ner got the mes­sage. “The idea that a news­pa­per is going to be peoples’ first port of call to find out what’s going on in the world is simply no longer valid. So you have to add another layer: ana­lysis, inter­pret­a­tion, point of view.” Kel­ner now dubs his daily a “viewspaper.”