Justin Byam Shaw
The Pioneer
The frontier and an appetite for the unknown, goes first.
Justin Byam Shaw emerges in this interview as a Pioneer whose defining instinct is to identify massive mismatches and move into territory others dismiss as unworkable. He describes buying the Independent newspaper for minus 17 million when rivals predicted failure, then executing the first successful digital-only transformation of a major newspaper globally.
“Just wouldn't work for us. We could get endlessly more clicks if we wanted to, but that's not how we're positioned. Our big area of growth is in the US, where, in fact, we're much bigger outside the UK than in the UK, and we're seen as an internationalist, possibly slightly left-of-centre, but liberal quality operator.”
“The thing about classics is it really teaches you to assimilate a lot of information quickly and make sense of it. It orders your thoughts. Wasn't the obvious training for advertising, which was my first job. I was a graduate trainee, as you mentioned at Ogilvy and possibly the worst graduate trainee they've ever had.”
“And my partner said, I know you get 300 postcards a week from viewers. Why don't you try putting on the telephone, connect it to our computer, and we'll be able to tell you in real time what results you get. Amazingly, they agreed.”
“Newspaper anywhere in the world, just lonely, and it proves this is the future of a newspapers. I don't see anyone reading newspapers in 20 years' time for many reasons, not only for environmental as well as the obvious economics of going through this incredibly victorian process of printing on dead trees, remotely, getting your product a…”
Money Maze Podcast: “Building a Charity, Buying The Independent Newspaper and Facing Tragedy – With Justin Byam Shaw, Founder of The Felix Project”
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