Newspaper & Mailroom
Alexander Lebedev and the Future of Newspapers
Monday 19. April 2010 - Russian billionaire Alexander Lebedev, who made headlines with his purchases of the London Evening Standard and the Independent in the United Kingdom, has joined the programme of the World Editors Forum, to be held in Beirut, Lebanon, from 7 to 10 June next.
Mr Lebedev bought the loss-making Evening Standard for the symbolic sum of one pound last year and immediately relaunched it as a free newspaper, sharply increasing its readership as a result.
He bought the Independent and the Independent on Sunday last month, also for one pound, though its previous owners, Independent News & Media, agreed to pay Mr Lebedevs company 9.25 million pounds over the next 10 months to assume “all future trading liabilities and obligations.”
“I do not treat newspapers as business. I treat them as my responsibility,” Mr Lebedev said in a recent interview with Agence France-Presse. “I think newspapers are the only instrument which, through investigative reporting, can ferret out everything about international corruption.”
Mr Lebedev will speak at a lunch gathering on Thursday, 10 June, at the World Editors Forum conference in Beirut, which features a series of special meetings in addition to its regular business sessions. Other featured speakers in these “social events”, for a limited number of registered WEF participants, include Saad Hariri, President of the Lebanese Council of Ministers, and Hassan Fadlallah, Chairman of the Lebanese Parliament Media Committee and a prominent member of Hezbollah.