Media: All about ... 20 years of The Independent.(Company overview)

Two decades on and profitability remains elusive, Alasdair Reid writes.

The launch issue of The Independent, on 7 October 1986, splashed with the headline: 'Conservatives try to halt sterling slide.' It was hardly one to set pulses racing.

Unluckily, the paper came into being during something of a news drought. Ironically, though, the big story in the run-up to the launch of The Independent - the kidnapping in Rome of the Israeli nuclear whistleblower, Mordecai Vanunu, by Mossad agents - spoke volumes about the state of the British press in the darker depths of the 80s.

Vanunu was in London at the behest of The Sunday Times, which wanted to spill the beans on Israel's nuclear weapons programme. He also approached The Sunday Mirror, whose owner Robert Maxwell allegedly tipped off Mossad.

When Fleet Street's finest were not making the news themselves, they acted as cheerleaders and propaganda sheets for narrowly defined interests in political and business life.

The nationals had started their drift away from the non-sectarian silent majority - a drift that has arguably continued and accelerated in the intervening years.

So the time was ripe for a fresh approach, and The Independent certainly promised that. Its launch advertising campaign - 'It is. Are you?' - was a clarion call to the open-minded reader. The newspaper promised incisive clarity and simplicity in its reporting.