Is Roger Alton safe at the Indy?

Is Roger Alton's position as editor of the Independent safe? Today, as he announced that 90 jobs - 60 of them editorial posts - are to be lost from his newspaper and its sister publication, the Independent on Sunday - he gave an alarmingly frank interview to Sky News Online, in which he admitted that his decision to raise the cover price of the Independent from 80 pence to £1 had had a disastrous effect on circulation.

"I feel a terrible personal failure," said Alton, who only took on the editorship in July. “It's a very nasty place to be if you're me. I feel like I've let down all the staff – it's a tight, lean staff who work fantastically hard. And I feel like I haven't been able to deliver either to them or the senior management."

The two titles reportedly lose around £12m a year. The Independent is the lowest selling national daily in Britain, with some media commentators believing it has fallen below 200,000 copies a day.

To add to Alton’s woes, many believe that the owners, Independent News & Media (INM), are trying to offload the two titles. As reported here, Zac Goldsmith, the prospective Tory MP and son of the late financier Sir James Goldsmith, entered into talks, though these came to nothing. And Associated Newspapers, who own the Daily Mail, are said to have offered INM's chief executive £1 for the debt-ridden papers.

But Alton, who is credited with working a small miracle as editor of
the Observer, where he bucked the trend and increased circulation, gave his "100 per cent" guarantee that the two papers would not be sold. But many are asking what this guarantee is worth.
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