Goodbye to the man who made The Independent great

David Lister recalls Andreas Whittam Smith, co-founder and pioneering first editor of this paper, who has died aged 88

- David Lister

There are few things so exciting as starting a new venture, and the autumn of 1986 - with the launch of Britain's first new broadsheet in more than a century - was full of excitement. For Andreas Whittam Smith, co-founder of The Independent and its first editor, who has died aged 88, work had begun before that, when he started recruiting that summer.

As one of the paper’s founder members - I began my Independent career on the news desk - I arrived in August and we started producing dummies every day, with reporters explaining to interviewees that, no, we were not calling from their local freebie paper of the same name.

Pre-launch, Andreas held regular meetings with staff to discuss the way forward. He charged us to develop his initial thoughts on how to cover the royal family. That resulted in an afternoon discussion in the home editor’s garden to come up with a policy that was to remain controversial for decades: the paper would give the royals precisely no coverage at all, unless the story had solid news value. Thus, the birth of one of the then-Prince Andrew’s daughters was worthy of a paragraph in the “news in brief” column.

From the start, Andreas took the entire workforce into his confidence. That willingness to share, and to offer praise, marked a distinct change from most newspaper editors, perhaps most bosses, of the time. Every month after the board meeting, he would give a staff briefing, a habit unknown in newspapers and one that made us all feel included in the adventure - until his briefings started leaking to The Guardian.

Regular praise helped make us all feel that