...the Guardian is much bigger than any one editor. A rival kindly took me out to lunch soon after I started and reassured me: “If I take a day off, there are six assistant editors who have a completely different view of what my paper should be. If you take the day off, the building itself would produce the Guardian.”El muro de pago
Some publishers have decided to erect walls around their digital content and insist on payment. The polar opposites are represented by the Guardian and the Times of London, the latter of which today claims a daily digital audience of around 281,000. In April the Guardian was read by more than 7 million unique browsers a day. On an equal accounting basis, we’re losing (or investing) about the same amount of money. You’ll have to come back in 10 or even 20 years time to find out who judged the future best. But the Guardian – still the eighth-biggest newspaper in the UK – is now vying with the New York Times for the mantle of largest serious English-language newspaper website in the world.El cambio de estándar a berlinés
Then there was an interlude with the print Format Wars – a response to the bold move by the Independent and Times to switch from broadsheet publishing to tabloid. The Indie even announced that it would henceforth be a “viewspaper”, not a newspaper – a startling declaration of intent that got lost in the excitement about size.
For various reasons – not least the amount of classified advertising we still took in print at that point – tabloid didn’t really work for us. We needed new presses anyway – the cost of any format was neutral – and opted for the European Berliner size.El poder de corregir y la genial descripción de un periódico de David Broder
Early in my editorship I gave away significant power: the power of correction. It seemed obvious to me that journalism, as an imperfect medium, will always include mistakes – and that the very last person to adjudicate on whether or not an error had been made was the person responsible for the error in the first place.
I have never forgotten this tell-it-like it is description of a newspaper by the Washington Post’s David Broder: “[A] partial, hasty, incomplete, inevitably somewhat flawed and inaccurate rendering of some of the things we have 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 lift it from the doorstep and read it in about an hour. If we labelled the product accurately, then we could immediately add: ‘But it’s the best we could do under the circumstances, and we will be back tomorrow, with a corrected and updated version.’”Para quiénes trabajamos
...we editors just pass through. We all know that you, the readers, are the real carriers of the flame.
La une doit servir à mettre en scène le ou les choix de Libération : quand l’actualité est exceptionnelle, elle restera exceptionnelle. Sinon, elle doit pouvoir montrer la hiérarchie de la rédaction et présenter la richesse du journal. Libération, c’est une Une et plus de 30 pages ensuite.
