I don’t often get HTML envy, but Roger Black has a damn fine looking blog. And he has a few thoughts on one of my favourite current themes – trust.

More than a profession, the newsroom was convinced that journalism was a public trust, which implies that the public was somehow complicit in this. Journalists believed that they had deserved this trust. The business was so good that the permanence of their social institution was taken for granted.

Of course the public was involved in the deal, but not in the way journalists came to think. People bought the newspapers, not so much because they needed them, but because they liked them. Newspapers were useful, yes, and even necessary during wars and recessions, but people paid money for them because they were interesting and sometimes fun.