Today’s issue represents yet another milestone on The Malta Independent’s 21-year road. As many of our regular readers will have undoubtedly noticed, today’s issue sports a brand new design, which brings our daily and Sunday editions closer together, in the process creating a more unified brand. 

Our Sunday newspaper has had a facelift and it has also gone to an all-colour format, and we are positive that our readers will be as pleased with what they are seeing as we at Standard Publications are.

In tandem with these developments in our Sunday paper, our daily newspaper will also enter a new era as of tomorrow’s issue. For starters, our daily edition is being resized and reformatted into what is a more crisp and compact size – easier for our readers to manage and with a new appeal provided by this compactness, which we are also positive our readers will appreciate.

Our daily edition will, of course, remain in full colour as it has been for some time now and it will still be printed on recycled paper with water based inks – in a reflection of our environmental ethos, which we firmly believe in.

In another development planned for tomorrow, our website – www.independent.com.mt, the country’s fastest growing website – will also be entering new and exciting territory with the incorporation of audio-visual content.  This new dimension will undoubtedly present us with a challenge, but, after all, it is only by constantly challenging oneself that one continuously improves.

We could have easily grown complacent given the resounding success of our news portal – just one year down the road since its re-launch into the vibrant news medium that it now is. But we intend to continue building on the remarkable success we have registered so far and our new audio-visual offering will certainly help in no small way in this respect.

Many have now made The Malta Independent their first stop for the information they need and news they need to read. Like our newspapers, our online edition has broken news countless times, and it has often spread like wildfire as readers share the information on the social networks.

As a publishing house we have come a long way over these last two decades, as has the country, and we have been there every step of the way to cover the events that have shaped our country and our world. And we will continue to do so in new and innovative ways.

Yes, we have changed but we have remained true to our founding principles, which are perfectly reflected in our title – The Independent.

But, most importantly, we will continue to deliver to the nation the news that the people should know and need to know – without hidden agendas, providing a truly independent voice in what is otherwise at many times a wilderness of spin, misinformation and disinformation.

We will continue to bring our readers the unbiased news they have come to expect from us and we will continue to call a spade a spade without fear or favour – not only because those are the values that we pride ourselves upon, but also because that is what you, our readers, want, expect and deserve to be given.

Our allegiances do not lie with this or that party – our allegiance has been and will remain to you, the people, first and foremost and above all else.

As a fully independent newspaper – not only in name but, more importantly, in ethos – we have a love/hate relationship with both the country’s main political parties. We call it as we see it − we make no apologies for that and we will continue to do so.

As for our these new developments in our Sunday, daily and online editions, the advantages and benefits are multiple, but those will be best left for readers to judge and we will welcome their feedback on these new ventures, and on the other new ventures which we are sure to embark upon in the not too distant future.