Amol Rajan

Amol Rajan was editor of The Independent from 2013-2016

Throughout its 30-plus years, The Independent has had a reasonable claim to be among the most innovative news publishers anywhere.

Its launch in 1986, by three Telegraph hacks who felt there was political space and a gap in the market to launch a high-minded, non-partisan, internationalist publication, was an act of courage.

In 2003, Simon Kelner, its longest-serving Editor, had the vision to produce broadsheet journalism in 'compact' or tabloid size, and to say that in the age of the internet and 24-hr news it was viewspapers, not newspapers, that people wanted.

In 2010, it launched a sister paper called i, which was sold six years later for over £25m, and has a circulation of around 270,000. I see it everywhere.

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Who is Sultan Muhammad Abuljadayel, the man who has just bought a 30% stake in the Independent online newspaper?

He is a rich man who wants to be richer, in short; and a Saudi investor seeking influence.

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If you ask experienced people in the world of broadcasting what they think of these salary disclosures, three clear and consistent points are apparent.

First, the BBC pays below - and sometimes much below - market rates, both at management level and in terms of top broadcasting talent.

When I said hello to Rupert Murdoch outside the Manhattan headquarters of his media empire last month, he told me he was "not worried at all" about Ofcom.

It turns out his confidence was misplaced, but not for reasons that are simple, or were widely predicted.

The attack on Muslims at Finsbury Park mosque has prompted a debate about whether the media has inherent biases, and caused a major kerfuffle within Britain's newspapers.

To take just a single example, one person on Twitter said of The Times's front page: "He's white, so let's highlight the fact that he's jobless, a lone wolf and suffered mental health issues."

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We await better data, of course, but a few days after Theresa May's humiliation at the ballot box it is not too early to say this election was a watershed... for the media.

As many Tories have pointed out, their party increased its share of the vote for the fifth election in a row, something no party has ever done before. What took everyone by surprise was the astonishing surge in support for Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party.

Researchers at Oxford University have found that the quality of news available to British voters on Twitter is superior to that available to Americans ahead of the election of Donald Trump as president.

The Oxford Internet Institute has also discovered that there have been more tweets about Labour than other political parties so far in the campaign.

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There's been a lot of "fair play, George Osborne" on Twitter in recent days, commending him for breaking a series of agenda-setting political stories.

There was the line about how not a single member of the cabinet supports the prime minister's immigration cap, followed by the scoop about her swivel on social care.

So it turns out that a prime minister's word isn't always sacrosanct - because, after all, he or she won't be in No 10 forever.

Victims of press abuse in Britain believe they were given a cast-iron guarantee that the second stage of the Leveson Inquiry, which would look at corporate governance at Rupert Murdoch's News International as well as the relationship between Britain's press and the police, would definitely go ahead.

I can reveal that Gordon Brown has written to Culture Secretary Karen Bradley, arguing that his experience of the new press regulator IPSO strengthens the case for a second stage of the Leveson Inquiry.

The former Prime Minister had a complaint upheld against The Daily Telegraph, concerning his expenses. The paper re-published an old heading, "The Truth About the Cabinet Expenses", together with a picture of Brown and his brother.