Morning Update: The Independent ditches print; Bernie Sanders targets injustice; Microsoft answers questions you didn’t ask
The Guardian: Independent and Independent on Sunday print closures confirmed
Evgeny Lebedev has confirmed that the Independent and Independent on Sunday will cease printing, with the last editions to be published in late March.
Lebedev, who also confirmed the sale of the cut-price national stablemate i to Johnston Press, did not reveal how many of the 150 full-time staff would lose their jobs. Including regular casual staff it is thought that at this stage there will be about 111 redundancies, although this could change.
Campaign Live: Media industry reacts to closure of Independent print titles
“I imagine ESI Media can’t believe what a price they got for i at 4.6 times last year’s profits [the sale price was £24 million]. But how on earth on the balance sheet do you unpick i from The Independent? Even from an advertising trading point of view, they’ve been trading together for some time. If you book at The Independent, you’re booking in the i at the same time. Who’s to say how you attribute the value to each of them internally?
The Drum: Man proposes to girlfriend on cover of the Observer magazine
This morning (Valentine’s Day) The Guardian’s Sunday sister title the Observer has allowed one reader to propose to his girlfriend by asking her through its front cover.
James Grieg is pictured on the front cover with an engagement ring and the question “Will you Marry me Katie?” as the headline.
The question is to Katie Moore, who, according to the gesture inside explaining the story behind the proposal, is set to get “quite a shock”.
AdWeek: Leo Burnett Built a Livable Model of Van Gogh’s ‘Bedroom’ That You Can Rent on Airbnb
From igloos to Netflix and Chill, Airbnb fans have an awesomely quirky variety of accommodation options to choose from these days. And starting Sunday, art geeks can live out their Van Gogh fantasies via Airbnb through a new effort by Leo Burnett.
The Art Institute of Chicago’s latest exhibit, which opens today, brings together all three versions of Van Gogh’s ‘The Bedroom’ for the first time in North America. To commemorate the exhibit, Burnett in Chicago worked with the museum (and media agency Spark) to build a full-scale, livable model of the work in a historical downtown Chicago building.
In this four-minute online film released by the Bernie Sanders campaign, Erica Garner talks about her life as an activist in the wake of the 2014 death of her father Eric, who died in a police chokehold that a bystander caught on video. (A New York grand jury declined to bring charges against the officer who killed Eric Garner. The U.S. Justice Department then launched a civil rights investigation; a grand jury is currently hearing evidence on the case.)
Marketing NW: A Challenge To Traditional Agencies
Advertising agencies are fighting a losing battle today, with declining fees, growing workloads and downsized organisations. Agency CEOs are failing their firms by fostering organisational freedom rather than showing ways to create success in the more complex and competitive media world. They should emulate the leaders of management-consulting firms, who are succeeding and growing.
The New Breed. There’s a new breed of digital agency eating the traditional agencies’ lunch, and it’s coming out of the management-consulting world. Deloitte Digital grew into a $1.5 billion company overnight. Accenture is adding digital-marketing capabilities, as is McKinsey.
Digiday: What kind of dog are you? Microsoft’s Fetch answers the question you never asked
