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idea that a newspaper is going to be peoples’ first port of call to find out what’s going on in the world is simply no longer valid.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.”