Corporate Social Responsibility and Newspapers

From a speech given at Harvard on October 14, 2006.

I'm very honoured to be giving this lunchtime talk to such a distinguished group of American journalists and academics.

Alex Jones wrote me a very nice letter back in August inviting me to speak about how the Guardian ran itself and wondering whether there were any lessons for the more commercial environment in which most American media work.

I was reminded of the centenary history of the Manchester Guardian, published in 1921, which extended to an American edition. The great editor CP Scott - who had been at the helm since 1875 but I don't think ever made it to these shores - wrote an introduction to this edition in which he wrote.

"It seems such a friendly thing to have an American Edition and that it should be taken for granted that quite an appreciable number of American citizens should be interested in the life and development of a single English newspaper."

I feel rather the same today - pleasantly surprised that there should be a modest amount of friendly interest in what we get up to at the Guardian. I hope some of the themes I'm going to talk about today - which are about accountability, transparency and opening an editorial process up to a certain amount of independent challenge - have some wider resonances.

At the heart of what I want to explore today is what it means to run a newspaper on the sort of ethical lines we urge everyone else to abide by in public and corporate life. What does "corporate social responsibility" mean in terms of a media organisation? How would you measure it, and why does it matter? And is any of this important given the other issues we're discussing this weekend?

I should begin by explaining a bit about the Guardian - the story of how we do things doesn't mean much without understanding how we got here.

The paper is now in its 185th year: it currently sells just under 400k copies a day in the UK and is the biggest British newspaper on the web, with nearly 13million unique users a month.

In the past two years it's twice been voted the best newspaper website in the world and, somewhat to our surprise, has at least as many, if not more, web readers in the USA than the LA Times.

That more than four million Americans should have stumbled on us without us spending a cent in advertising is rather intriguing, which is why we recently appointed Mike Kinsley as our American Editor with a view to seeing if he can find another four million.

The paper's origins lie in the Peterloo massacre of August 1819, when troops rode into a peaceful crowd of Manchester protestors who had been demanding an extension of the vote, By the end of the day 11 members of the crowd had been killed and 560 unarmed civilians injured, a great many of them seriously, Among those locked up that evening was the sole reporter who witnessed the savagery, a certain Mr Tyas of the London Times.

There was a great fear that, with the only independent journalist out of circulation, the first version of events would be the official one - written by the very magistrates who had unleashed the murder on the crowd. But a man called John Edward Taylor wrote his own account, which he sent to London by the night coach and which appeared within 48 hours - and which was never overtaken by the so-called official version.

Inspired by what he'd done, Taylor decided to found a newspaper in Manchester. He called it the Manchester Guardian. The first issue appeared in 1821

(and, incidentally, included a short announcement of the death of Napoleon.) Shortly afterwards Taylor married a woman called Sophia Russell Scott. Sophia's nephew was CP Scott, who at the age of 25 became editor and remained in charge of - and owner of - the paper for an astonishing 57 years, dying in 1932.

Scott's son, Edward, took over as editor, but in his first year was tragically killed in a boating accident while on Lake Windermere with his son Richard, who is still alive today. The threat of a double set of death duties placed the newspaper in some jeopardy and, in an act of supreme selflessness, the Scott family set up a trust to own the Manchester Guardian, to ensure its independence and to enable it to live on in perpetuity.

And so we move to the present day.

The Scott Trust still owns the paper. It operates with a light touch. Trustees have a self-denying ordinance about discussing the paper's political line or the finer details of management or finance. They appoint editors (of which I am only the 10th since Taylor himself) and gives them one instruction, and only one: to carry on the traditions of the paper "as heretofore."

What does that mean? It means understanding, and being true to, the liberal and progressive ethos of the paper. It means an attachment to high journalistic ethical standards. It carries an assumption that the paper will be serious, politically independent and international in its outlook. Lord Robert Cecil once described the Guardian as "righteousness made readable." I'm not sure he intended it as a compliment

The only place any of this is written down is in Scott's famous 1921 essay on journalism, the one which includes the famous sentence about comment being free and facts being sacred.

The same essay contains a passage on the relationship between the editorial and business sides of a newspaper.

"it is a mistake to suppose that the business side of a paper should dominate, as sometimes happens, not without distressing consequences. A newspaper, to be of value, should be a unity, and every part of it should equally understand and respond to the purposes and ideals which animate it. Between its two sides there should be a happy marriage, and editor and business manager should march hand in hand, the first, be it well understood, just an inch or two in advance."

The managing directors of the Guardian just love to be reminded of that last phrase! But, in Scott's view, the editor was the crucial figure and the editorial content mattered more than profit. Today, the Guardian editor is one of only two people in the organisation who sit on the divisional board, the group board and the Trust itself.

Today - in a climate in which three out of four of the main British quality dailies, are losing money and the fourth has seen its profits halved in a few years - the Scott Trust asks that the paper should be run efficiently and be "profit-seeking." It does not necessarily expect the Guardian to be in profit, let alone earn the sort of returns many big American media organisations are used to (or were used to) seeing from newspapers. Trustees understand that serious public service journalism isn't always compatible with enormous circulations or huge profits. With the Scott Trust there's no question which comes first.

That's just as well at the moment, because it's certainly my view - perhaps a near universal one among newspaper folk - that we're going to go through a very testing period in which newspaper print sales and revenue - rather crudely represented by a blue line here - are going to decline while our hopes and expectations (the red line) are that digital consumption and revenue will grow - but not nearly fast enough. So we're all going to be in that green bubble. The panic temptation to slash away at costs is going to be almost irresistible. The newspapers which will survive will be the ones with values, a long-term vision and a belief in journalism. That doesn't have to be the preserve of a Trust. I think it's true, for instance, of Rupert Murdoch,

It's going to be even more testing as we move from a world in which we dealt in one medium - text and still pictures - to a world in which we will probably be telling stories in text, pictures, audio and video. We move from the comparative comfort of being up against a small number of other newspapers to a new world in which we're competing against any number of other media and technology companies.

It's as well to ask yourself what you stand for, what you do well, or risk losing any special identity in a very crowded stadium of people shouting for attention. These are some of the attributes we think belong with the Guardian.

Some media organisations could claim some of the qualities or aspirations on that list. Very few could claim the whole set. Writing them down like that helps cement what we think important and also helps our editorial and business decisions in terms of thinking what we should concentrate on.

We will all be tested - and have already been. Most recently the Trust's commitment to serious journalism came with the Autumn 2004 stampede of the British quality press into tabloid format - with the Independent, famously, re-branding itself as a "viewspaper" rather than what it had been for the first 18 years of its 20-year life - on outfit that did news bit before it did the comment bit.

When I saw the direction the Independent was going I thought 'how on earth could you possibly try to be the Guardian and yet compete in the same format on the newsstand with a paper which is adopting tabloid techniques to maximise sale? The destination that leads to was best exemplified by the recent issue in which the paper was guest-edited by Giorgio Armani, whose main idea was to black up the super model Kate Moss to look like an African Aids victim. Anticipating such a trend, I went to the Trust and asked "Can we possibly not go tabloid?" Instead, I recommended instead that we adopt the Berliner format, common in Europe. We got McKinseys in to do the maths: they demonstrated that, over a 15 year span, the switch of format would be cost neutral, if not actually positive. The Trust didn't need much convincing.

In order to allow the Guardian that kind of comfort zone to pursue these high ideals expected of it the Trust has, over the years, built up a series of profitable media businesses, run on pretty conventional lines. They include a radio, magazine and regional newspaper business, all of which sit alongside the Guardian and Observer in a parent company called the Guardian Media Group.

The arrangement is, in my view as a editor, almost a miracle. We, as journalists, are free to produce what we hope is a great newspaper along the lines we - and we alone - determine. And over us is a benign presence that will make sure that, within reason, we have the resources to do what we all believe in. There is no proprietor or conventional corporate structure telling us what to think. Our only relationship is with each other - and with the readers.

For the arrangement to work both bits of the organisation need a fairly subtle understanding of the unique nature of the deal.

Guardian journalists appreciate that the rest of the company is run on tough, commercial lines - both in terms of profit expectations and rewards. And our colleagues in the other divisions show an understanding that, constitutionally, legally and morally, they are there to support liberal journalism at its best - the production of which may not always conform to how you might behave were the market alone to rule.

Having listened politely so far, you may well be switching off at this point. "This is lovely if you're in the happy position of having a protecting angel over your business," you may be thinking to yourself. "But most of us live in the real world. The owners of American media companies are not about the sign over their worldly possessions into not-necessarily-for-profit Trust.s"

Well, you're quite right and the last thing I want to do is to lecture anyone about how they should run their companies. But I can share with you our thinking about the reasons we do things in the way we do, which are as much about self-interest as the desire to behave well.

Let me begin with what we put in the paper.

The famous Scott Essay of 1921 contains another striking sentence

"A newspaper is of necessity something of a monopoly, and its first duty is to shun the temptations of monopoly"

Some would argue with that proposition. Britain, for instance, has an intensely competitive national press - quite different to many American or European cities which are now served by one, or at most, two titles.

But only the wilfully blind could be oblivious to the widespread concerns people have about the power of the so-called mainstream media. As an editor, I share those concerns. I was rather alarmed by the power I acquired the day, just over 11 years ago, I walked into the editor's office for the first time. Editors do have the power to make or break people. They can sit as judge and jury on people in public life. They can - or until recently, they could - determine who is allowed a voice in public debate, and who is denied one. They are astonishingly unfettered (compared, say, with any law enforcement agency) to snoop out information on people's private lives, Several British newspapers voice fears about the implications of the Big Brother state - with the prospect of centralised computer databases for security, welfare and health records. In some cases these same newspapers think nothing of paying for exactly the same information about celebrities' private lives using private investigators as cut-outs.

For a long time we could behave with a certain arrogance because we had the playing field to ourselves. We were - quite correctly - fierce in fighting for our rights. We were less interested in talking about our responsibilities, far less any notions of transparency, accountability, responsiveness...or discussions about our own ethical standards and methods.

The explosion of new technologies, most of them web-based, has enabled our readers to challenge all that - to criticise us, to interrogate us, to expose us, to offer alternatives to us, to by-pass us altogether.

Most of it boils down to one word: Trust. And - in this new world where you can get your information, much of it free, from any number of sources - it's always seemed to me that we ought to think about trust rather more carefully than we used to.

There's a particularly notorious English football club whose supporters' chant runs "Nobody Loves Us, We don't care." That could equally well have served as an anthem for the British press.

All surveys of trust in Britain show a public very sceptical about whether their newspapers can be trusted to tell the truth. The most recent one by the parliamentary committee on standards in public life show that the so-called quality papers are trusted by about 39 per cent whereas tabloid papers are only trusted by 9 per cent of the population.

So, whatever our ownership structure, I think self-interest dictates that we should start to care more about trust.

What have we done about that on the Guardian in editorial terms?

The most basic responsibility we have is to be accurate and truthful in what we write. So the most fundamental duty is to have systems in place that alert us when we get things wrong so that we can correct, amplify or clarify matters where - as in inevitable in all forms of journalism - we get things wrong. Some of these things are commonplace in some American news organisations. They're pretty rare in Britain.

We began, four years ago, by agreeing and publishing a Code of Practice - the rules by which we'd behave as Guardian journalists. This covers such things as respect for privacy, declaration of outside interests, covering suicides, use of non-attributable quotes, financial reporting, subterfuge. Anyone can read it on our website and judge us by the standards we set ourselves.

Nine years ago I appointed an independent readers' editor. Anyone can contact him directly about anything in the paper which concerns them - primarily errors and points of clarification. There are numerous complaints about English usage, accuracy, graphics and use of statistics. The present Readers' Editor, Ian Mayes, has also dealt with declarations, or conflicts, of interest, plagiarism, manipulation of pictures and a host of other worries.

Some colleagues on other papers - in resisting this approach - argue that it's the editor who should deal with these matters since they are the responsibility of the editor. Well, in an important sense that's true. But there's the problem that he/she was responsible for the error in the first place, so it's questionable whether he/she is really the best person to sit in judgement on his or her own error. There are not many areas of corporate life where consumers or customers have no independent channel of approach to , or appeal against, the decision of the people who run a company. If you want people to trust you, it helps to have an independent method of measurement of arbitration.

Ian Mayes deals with 18,000 complaints, comments and queries a year - broken down to around 40 or 50 phone calls a week and as many as 200 or 300 emails a week. I've no idea if this is good or bad - I rather doubt that the Guardian is significantly more error-ridden or ethically compromised than its British counterparts, but as no-one else has a comparable system or makes any attempt to systematically correct mistakes it's a little hard to know whether this is a sign of health or otherwise. I do feel confident about two things: one, that very few errors escape detection. We have millions of eyes crawling over every word we write - an unpaid army of fact checkers. So the writers know that, crudely, they won't get away with making a mistake. Secondly, the system does alert us to problems with unreliable individuals or processes to which we would otherwise not be alive.

The Readers editor corrects our errors in the most prominent place in the paper, after the front page. That's to say next to the editorial column.

He also has a weekly column in which he can discuss any editorial matters raised by readers, or which he considers important. He might use this space to discuss over coverage of mental health or of the middle east. - sometimes polling editorial staff, or readers, for their views. He's aired uncomfortable issues about individual reporters or stories. With some of them, my first instinct was " why are we washing this dirty laundry in public?" I think I can say that my subsequent reaction was always, "Thank god we made a clean breast of that."

Two examples: One uncomfortable column quoted our own code of conduct on the manipulation of pictures...

Before going on to ask why we manipulated a picture: we bleached out a bloody limb from a picture of the aftermath of the 2004 Madrid train bombings.

The answer was an understandable urge to protect readers from a distressing image. I know, because I made the call. But it was the wrong call. Several other papers tweaked the image in some ways. We were the only one to own up and examine our behaviour.

Another column looked at the circumstances behind a young reporter getting his facts badly wrong in a violent situation in China.

It might have been more comfortable to have drawn a veil over the matter - though that's difficult when the bloggers are going wild over an error of this significance. But, actually, Ian's column helped the reader understand why the reporter got it wrong; won us some respect among a wide body of readers whose trust in us had been shaken and who believed newspapers never apologized; and made us re-think both our policy on sending inexperienced reporters into conflict zones and how we're bad at thinking about trauma in the context of journalism.

On four days a week we publish a Response column on the leader pages where people who have been written about in the paper can reply . It's not quite a "right to reply" , more an "opportunity to reply." I think it's the only such reserved space in the British press.

I hope all this adds up to an editorial process which allows external challenge to our journalism and is, I hope, educative on both sides. It helps reporters and editors understand better the concerns of readers and takes out of their hands decisions about which errors deserve correction. It can also inform readers about the reasons behind decisions or policies and the way we work. On both sides I think it's educative about journalism - how, very often, the truth is elusive and is sometime best reached by a process of accretion or subtraction - which may involve clarifying, adding, withdrawing, testing and correcting.

One final thing about the editorial processes, and this is an internal matter. On many papers, it's only a small group of executives who get the chance to comment on the paper or to input ideas. Conferences are semi-secret affairs, except for the privileged few. Each morning at the Guardian begins with the opposite - an open editorial conference - open, that is, to any member of staff.

Each and every day the meeting - which can be attended by anything from 25 people to 70 or more - is invited to say what they thought of the previous days' paper. If people are unhappy with any aspect of editorial policy, they'll say so. It's another way of introducing some accountability and challenge into a process that can, in my view, too easily reflect the pre-occupations and prejudices of a small group of executives. It doesn't mean you edit a paper by committee.

We frequently give a summary of these discussions on an editors' blog. That blog, incidentally, appears on the Comment is Free site, a site we've created where our own commentators debate in the same space as readers, or people with a specialist knowledge of a subject who wish to take part in the conversation. It's as if the Huffington Post existed in the same space as the New York Times. Difficult to imagine, perhaps, and quite often a bumpy ride. But all part of the continual experimentation demanded of media organizations by the Web 2.0 era. In seven months we've registered 1,000 commentators. We've carried more than 6,000 piece of comment, less than half of which also appeared in the paper, and around 240,00 responses, almost none of which were also printed in the paper. In other words, we've opened our doors and, in doing so, we've widened the liberal debate to include hundreds of people who would previously have had no mass public platform.

This is partly about good journalism, it's partly about resisiting the temptations of monopoly... and, if we're honest, it's partly about not wanting to see our community of readers disappear over the hill into the sunset. If we don't learn some of the lessons about openness and responsiveness of web 2.0 we won't see our readers for dust.

So, these are a few of the measures and internal processes we've introduced into the paper to make it more open, more transparent, less - in the jargon of the new technologies - a tablet of stone handed down from on high.

But we thought we should go further in trying to assess whether the staff are with us in our perceptions of how we were running the paper. So, twice in the past three years, we've commissioned an outside firm to survey staff across the company - editorial and commercial . The headline findings this year were encouraging.

91 per cent proud to work for the company

90 per cent put in extra effort

79 per cent enjoy their work

73 per cent would actively recommend us an employer.

But it was important to drill a little deeper. Here are some of the results we got this year, compared with the first survey in 2003.

A series of questions about how people felt about working at the company produced generally high scores - 5 indicates strong agreement, 1 strong disagreement.

But, there was some concern about whether there was a gap between the Scott Trust's values and how we lived them as a company

People like their working colleagues and we found little evidence of bullying or harassment.

But there were grounds for concern about diversity and fairness issues - whether we were doing enough to encourage a more diverse workforce and whether selection for internal jobs was fair

Of course, having done such a survey there's the question of what you do with it . Should we really be airing staff concerns about lack of feedback and inability of some managers to confront poor performance? Or their complaints about pay and career development Crudely, how transparent were we willing to be? In the end we decided we'd publish all the results both internally and externally, in our social audit. More of which in a minute.

As I said at the start, a lot of this is about addressing the issue of trust. It seems to me that we are, collectively as an industry, in some trouble on this score. We're all going to have work harder at the things all organisations or institutions do when trust begins to erode.. We have a job on our hands to persuade the generation that newspapers hold any kind of appeal. We have to work harder at convincing them that our sort of journalism carries a weight and authority that can't easily be found elsewhere.

The British poltical philosopher, Onora O'Neill, has been exploring this theme in the BBC Reith lectures she gave in 2002 and since:

The press are skilled at making material accessible but erratic about making it assessable

She continued:

* For all of us who have to place trust with care in a complex world, reporting that we cannot assess is a disaster. If we can't trust what the press report, how can we tell whether to trust those on whom they report?

* An erratically reliable or unassessable press might not matter for privileged people with other sources of information. They can tell which stories are near the mark and which are confused, vicious or simply false; but for most citizens it matters.

How can we tell whether newspapers, websites and publications that claim to be independent are not, in fact, promoting some agenda? How can we tell whether and when we are on the receiving end of hype and spin, of misinformation and disinformation?

As our thinking about all these issues developed we thought it right to move beyond a concern about editorial processes to examining how we behaved as a newspaper company - an exercise in the sort of corporate social responsibility we, as newspapers, love to urge on others without always seeing why we should do it ourselves.

So we decided we'd subject the Guardian, the Observer and our website, Guardian Unlimited, to the sort of social audit we suggest would be improving for other organisations. We've actually now done three of them and are about to publish a fourth. We call them "Living our Values".

One should begin by conceding that many people have reservations about social auditing. There are plenty of critics who complain that it has become merely a glossy extension of a company's PR and marketing function.

It seemed all the more important, therefore, that we should engage an independent social auditor to verify our report. As far as I know we remain the only media company to do this.

It was interesting to note that when we held a beauty parade to choose our auditor, all the companies that presented - bar one - spent little time talking about the actual auditing process but concentrated on the marketing benefits we could derive once we had completed the audit. Only one talked with passion about the process itself. We chose him.

Not only do we get an independent view on how we are doing, but the auditor also acts as a pressure point when we are not acting quickly enough. For example, his view that we were acting too slowly on improving our environmental performance led to the creating of an environment board champion, who is now consolidating activity across the company.

Without getting into too much detail, the auditor assess our Social Audit using the two recognised global standards on the credibility of reports and assurance processes.

We wanted to satisfy three tests:

* Materiality - is the information relevant?
* Completeness - is there the evidence that the company understands all its significant social, economic and environmental impacts?
* Responsiveness - is there evidence of a commitment to improving its performance?

The verdict from one of the country's leading social auditors - now working as the Svengali behind the Tory leader, David Cameron, was encouraging, and emphasises the point that most CSR reports are too dry and technical. We not only want people to enjoy reading our report but also to ensure that it has something of the creativity of our papers.

It's important to approach social auditing not merely as a reporting tool but as an agent of change. We have done this by creating key performance indicators in a number of areas and setting targets for change across the business.

So, for instance, we can measure the energy we use in our head office and offset the carbon emissions.

Other examples of this include using more wind-powered energy, improving supplier payment plans, creating a total rewards strategy, and implementing a comprehensive recycling strategy.

By far the biggest physical impact we have on the environment is through our paper purchasing with the Guardian and Observer using more than 100,000 tonnes of paper. We compared ourselves with other British newspaper and magazine publishers and found we were about the median. Recycled paper makes up around three-quarters of our paper and the Guardian, along with the rest of the industry, has taken great strides forward in this area. But we are lagging behind other sectors in the way we purchase virgin paper.

Most newspaper companies, including the Guardian, do not have accurate data on how much of our newsprint comes from certified sources and do not yet have strategies in place for tackling this.

In 2004, we commissioned consultants to advise on the responsible sourcing of paper. It concluded that whilst the majority of our suppliers were reputable, we were unable to guarantee that "all the fibre used to produce its newsprint comes from reputable sources."

As a result of this, we are currently auditing exactly where our paper comes from, and have committed to having a paper purchasing policy in place within the next year.

And so on. I won't go into much more detail about areas we've looked into, but if I show you a few slides you'll get an idea... and can always look up the full report on our websites.

So, briefly, a question about the sort of advertising people find unacceptable.... we did actually stop taking quite sex chat line adverts after the first audit, deciding that, though lucrative, they didn't fit in with our values.

We asked whether the content of the Guardian and Observer adequately reflected British society in terms of such issues or measures as ethinicity, gender, religion and geographic regionality. On this last question we clearly come across as too metropolitan in our coverage. A bit of a warning light. And there's only a lukewarm endorsement of the ethnic diversity of our writers.

We asked whether people found as value for money . Answer: not bad. That's a) encouraging, and b) gives us some idea of how we should approach a pricing strategy, given the economic model which has supported us through 185 years is being fairly fundamentally challenged.

We asked what people did with their papers after reading them: good news. 92 per cent of guardian readers recycle them.

We tested awareness of the papers' readers' editors - average - and whether people were inclined to believe the papers were more responsive because of them - pretty high. There's a high awareness of our policy on corrections.

We asked what forms of social engagement - from arguing with friends or family to making financial donations - had resulted from reading the guardian and observer. 80 per cent had argued about issues we raised, 60 per cent had boycotted products as a result of reading about them (that seems an interestingly high figure) and more than a third had been moved to dip into their pockets. A quarter had written to their MPs.

There's average awareness of our ownership structure, but - on prompting - a very strong belief that the papers and their website are true to the trust's mission.

And, finally, on trust. You'll remember that the public at large, asked about supposedly quality papers like the guardian, were only moderately inclined to trust them - the figure was 37 per cent. Well, the good news is that - among people who actually read the guardian - that figure rises to 86 per cent. That's terribly important to us. It's one thing to believe - see my earlier slide - that "trusted" should be an attribute of the Guardian. But believing it and measuring it are two different things.

Why do newspapers find some of this stuff so hard to do? I think some of the clues are in the anguished discussions such as we were hearing yesterday - all the things implicit in the fear of the move from 'me to you' to 'us to us'. Many in the so-called mainstream media feel besieged enough. They wonder what is happening to notions of journalistic authority. They're taken aback by the bitterness and hostility to what we do. So it's a perfectly understandable reaction not to give 'them' - the baying mob - the material to attack us any further. Show any weakness and they'll scent blood.

But - whoever owns you and whatever the business model - that's not going to work in future, if it ever did. Whatever scepticism any of us about any of the new media dogmas - wiki, ' we the media', 'the wisdom of crowds' - I really do believe the benefits of opening up outweigh any pain.

I want to end with my favourite definition of a newspaper - which appropriately, given his connection with the Shorenstein Center, was written by David Broder.

I lived in Washington for six months in 1987 and had a deep immersion in - and love affair with - American journalism.

During this time there was a book published by Broder in which he quoted his own remarks made, I think I'm right in saying, in 1978. So this was nearly 30 years ago, long before the bloggers got stuck into newspapers with their critiques of how inadequate and untrustworthy big old corporate news organisations were.

I remember reading this passage and a small light bulb going off in my head. This was what journalism was - not an exercise in perfection, but an exercise in imperfection. It was a complete reversal of what the story we told about ourselves. If we could be honest about the most basic truth about our business people would trust us more, not less. We might, I remember thinking, even be able to include them in the process. The more you could be open with your readers, the more they would believe in what you were doing.

Since many things I've talked about flowed from that American light bulb moment it seems worth just quoting it.

"I would like to see us say over and over until the point has been made... that the newspaper that drops on your doorstep is a partial, hasty, incomplete, inevitably somewhat flawed and inaccurate rendering of some of the things we heard about in the past 24 hours... distorted despite our best efforts to eliminate gross bias by the very process of compression that makes it possible for you... to read it in about an hour."

"If we labelled the paper accurately then we would immediately add: 'But it's the best we could do under the circumstances, and we will be back tomorrow with a corrected updated version...'"

Thank you for being a friendly audience and for your interest in the life and development of a single English newspaper.