Independent's i has some good news at last

Here is some good news. The Independent's 20p mini-version – the one they called " i " – started feebly last autumn, pottering around the 70,000 sales figure and threatening to fade into obscurity. A too soft, too cheese-paring launch. But a fortnight ago, Alexander Lebedev went to his bank and found £4m-plus to sing i 's praises on TV. Result: the Indy's high command reckon circulation at 170,000-plus. That's good because here's a new print venture making tracks – you don't have to be digital to have a future – and good because it shows that, for a youngish audience, price matters. Is the bigger, thicker Indy suffering in the process? Maybe somewhere between 1,500 and 4,000 copies a day, but nothing too stark. You could say win-win.Any slightly less good news? Well, newsprint costs are soaring 20%, which bites a big hole in 20p – and nobody can quite tell yet whether adding Indy and i circulations to create buoyant, agency-impressing ad rates will turn the hoped-for trick of making the consolidated package profitable. Oh! And maybe the oomph of that TV campaign shows that one gogglebox is still worth much more than two newspapers.