A delight to read Alan Rusbridger’s farewell (30 May), which reminded me why I identify myself so strongly as a member of the Guardian family. Rusbridger shows that the independence of the Scott Trust leads to the refusal to give up on investigations when others quail, and a style of editorship that shares decisions, and power, with others. I had not realised that the paper was born after the Peterloo massacre and have since found out that an earlier paper, the Manchester Observer, shut down because of libel cases rushed through the courts to stop its publication, recommended readers to follow the story in the new Manchester Guardian. What a pedigree. I, with so many others, wish Katharine Viner well as she develops a paper that keeps us thinking and hoping in hard times.
Roger Clough
Emeritus professor, Lancaster University
• Alan, thank you beyond words for your wonderful article and for what you, your editorial board and the Scott Trust have done for journalism – and for me, too. I got both my two main jobs through Guardian adverts. I starting taking the Guardian nearly 70 years ago in 1948, when I graduated from Manchester University in engineering. I have hardly missed a day since, not even when I first moved to Reading in 1958 and the paper came a day late. May you continue in your next role for many years.
Peter Grantham
Reading
• No newspaper can be perfect, but for me the Guardian gets pretty damn close. And of all the paper’s stories over the past 50 years, Alan Rusbridger’s Keep it in the ground campaign is the most urgent and important of all. Climate change is a multifaceted challenge with roots deeply embedded in our society and economy, and is worthy of a long-term commitment by the Guardian.
Here’s my challenge to Katharine Viner: stick with climate change as a major theme in your columns and let your tenacious investigative journalists loose on the subject. Dedicate your newspaper to a ceaseless exposure of all those organisations and institutions that endanger the future of life on this precious planet. And explore what we can do about it. It seems odd that individuals and groups around the world are more passionately concerned about climate change than many governments. Although nearly 200 nations have signed up to the UN climate negotiations, they seem unable or unwilling to legislate for fossil fuel companies to keep it in the ground.
This situation resonates at the local level, where environmental groups faced, for example, with coal mining proposals, find themselves up against big businesses with huge financial resources, political influence and, shamefully, government support. We need your help. One step would be for the Guardian to publish a weekly climate rights section, along the lines of your Consumer champions column, where concerned individuals and campaigners can seek advice in their attempts to prevent fossil fuel businesses in their area from causing further damage to our atmosphere.
Tony Claydon
Felton, Northumberland
• As Katharine Viner returns from the US to take the reins, may I suggest she reverses one of Mr Rusbridger’s few bad decisions: killing off the wonderful Guardian diary – a execution all the more surprising as Rusbridger cut his Guardian teeth on the diary (I recall sending him tip-offs in the distant mists of time). The diary replacement, the so-called Notebook is a failure, eminently miss-able, unlike the old diary’s early morning fix of intrigue and vituperation. I have worked with many great Guardian diarists: Steven Cook, Andrew Moncur, Maev Kennedy, Simon Bowers, Jon Henley, Marina Hyde and the peerless Hugh Muir. So, please, Katharine: bring back the beloved diary.
Dr David Lowry
Stoneleigh, Surrey
• Alan Rusbridger has shown exceptional skills and imagination in maintaining the balance between “material and moral existence – profit and power”, which, as CP Scott wrote 94 years ago, is essential if a newspaper is to be great. And during an era in which so many of his peers in the media and politics have lost or muddied it. But this is not a Big Yellow Taxi moment – we did know what we’d got before he was gone. Best wishes to Katharine Viner as the first woman editor to take up this precious legacy.
Richard Stainton
Whitstable, Kent
• I almost had tears in my eyes when reading Alan Rusbridger’s farewell to his readers – I think he is brilliant (and sexy with it). No danger, I am 87.
EL Trussell
Sudbury, Suffolk
• Glimpsed a shiny black and silver sticker above “Farewell, readers” on the front page and thought for a split second it was a souvenir fragment from the smashed hard drives.
Sandy Adirondack
London
• Just – thank you. Best wishes.
Bella D’Arcy Reed
Maldon, Essex
