Late last year the Guardian editor-in-chief, Katharine Viner, gave a speech containing commitments that readers are entitled to pursue. A sample of both tone and content: “We believe in the value of the public sphere; that there is such a thing as the public interest, and the common good; that we are all of equal worth; that the world should be free and fair.”
As I watched Viner deliver “A mission for journalism in a time of crisis” in an auditorium in London – and via the web to colleagues in the US and Australia – I thought about how it would become part of the role of readers’ editors in future to ask her how the mission was going.
The first step is to raise awareness of a speech that, in a time of challenge to institutional media, repays its reading time. With the paper Guardian changing shape and design again, it feels like the right occasion to draw your attention to it. The speech is a manifesto from an editor-in-chief early in her time in a role in which her two immediate predecessors served 20 years each, and the most famous Guardian editor, CP Scott, served 57 (1872-1929). In this speech Viner stands on the rock of the Guardian’s past, surveys the present and points to where she wants to lead a journalism organisation that is now both print and digital, UK and world.
Viner traces the emergence of the newspaper in Manchester in 1821 from the movement for more representative democracy. She itemises some leaps forward and slides backward during the Guardian’s rich history. By reference to the founders’ prospectus – “a wholly uncynical and unsnobbish document” – and other landmark statements, she reaffirms guiding values including honesty, integrity, courage, fairness, and a sense of duty to reader and community.
Partisans note: she repeats the founders’ promise that the Guardian will support policies not parties. The threats to journalism’s economic model in a new communications environment are described, but so are the opportunities those technologies offer for more collaborative journalism and a sustainable future. Viner acknowledges the farsightedness of her predecessor Alan Rusbridger. The large international audience, gathered through bold steps in digital, significantly strengthens the membership strategy now under way and Viner reminds us that: “The Guardian is now funded more by our readers than by our advertisers.”
The overarching theme is of hope – “authentic hope”, says one of her sources – in answer to a longing. “Our lives are increasingly atomised,” Viner says, “but you can see the pleasure that comes from communal or civic participation. People long to help each other, to be together, to share experiences, to be part of a community, to influence the powers that control their lives.”
The motivating force is that the Guardian can contribute to rebuilding the social capital that neoliberalism’s ascendancy has sapped. As it did at its beginnings in Manchester, the Guardian today should catch the mood of the people, says Viner, and I take her to mean the Guardian’s whole audience, UK and international.
As in the tumultuous early 19th century so now, she argues, the Guardian should not try to deny what is happening but acknowledge it, contextualise it, analyse it, try to understand it and, in the words of the prospectus, “turn it to beneficial account”.
As to promises, Viner commits the Guardian to follow five principles:
Develop ideas that help to improve the world, not just critique it.
Collaborate with readers and others to have greater impact.
Diversify, to have richer reporting from a representative newsroom.
Be meaningful in all our work.
Report fairly on people as well as power and find things out. This underpins all of the above.
Every now and then, in some of the myriad contexts that practising journalism generates, we will come back to this list.