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Hi Michael,
If you are seeing this, it is because you’re signed up to the Guardian’s website or one of our newsletters. If it’s the former you may well know me from the Politics Live blog – on air on the site most of the time. But do bear with me. Write something interesting, they said. So here goes.
It’s about my favourite quote about journalism, from an editorial in the Times in 1852. “The first duty of the press is to obtain the earliest and most correct intelligence of the events of the time, and instantly, by disclosing them, to make them the common property of the nation.”
I love this because it encapsulates so much of what I’m doing 170 years later.
“Earliest” – news is all about telling people what they don’t yet know. If you don’t enjoy that, you’re in the wrong job.
“Most correct” – coming straight after “earliest”, this implies the writer accepts there is an inherent tension between speed and accuracy/comprehensiveness. “Most correct” also implies an acceptance that the truth is rarely simple or binary, and that there is always something more to find out.
“Intelligence of the events of the time” – not “information” about the events of the time, but “intelligence”, which implies something richer, with context, depth and understanding. Raw facts aren’t enough.
“Instantly” – there was nothing instant about the way newspapers were produced in the 1850s, but this word implies the writer knew what it was like to launch a post on a blog.
And this is the part I like the best:
“The common property of the nation” – because it’s fine to share information with friends, fans or customers, but we live collectively, in a democracy we take decisions collectively, and if that process is going to work, then there are vast swathes of information (the level of the national debt, Thames Water’s pollution record, the death toll in Gaza, Boris Johnson’s lockdown partying record – the list is endless) that need to be “the common property of the nation”.
That is why public service journalism matters.
It is why I’m proud of what I do, even though I am just a small cog in an organisation where there are reporters far braver or more brilliant than me. The Guardian was set up after the Peterloo Massacre by people who wanted to make Britain (and the world, we’ve always been internationalist) better and fairer, and who believed that serious, intelligent, liberal reporting would play a role in this. It is still like that more than 200 years later.
I’m afraid you know what’s coming next …
Online, our work is free on our website. But it is getting harder than ever to fund quality journalism. Print revenues are drastically reduced and the digital environment is getting more hostile (especially with generative AI providing summaries on almost every platform, from WhatsApp to Facebook to Google), and increasingly news organisations are parking their content behind a paywall.
When other news organisations ask you for money, they are asking you to act out of self-interest (they are selling you a key to the paywall). We’re different. We’re asking you to act in the public interest because we are confident that Guardian journalism is a force for good, we want it to continue to be the “common property of the nation” (all nations, in fact), and we would like you to be part of the mission that makes that happen.
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