If one week is still a lifetime in politics then, for sure, the past 20 years has
been a cosmic eternity for journalism. It was difficult enough to launch
British Journalism Review in the 1980s. Eventually we succeeded after two
years of gestation and a generous financial grant from the Joseph Rowntree
Reform Trust, to which we remain eternally grateful. Today the BJR thrives
through the crucial support of a cluster of sponsors, listed on the inside front
cover, without whom we would be faced with the financial problems that
presently beleaguer many companies across the whole media spectrum.

Our sponsors and the support of our publishers, Sage, have enabled the
current editor and his team not only to sustain what remains a unique
publication but also, in my opinion, to have developed and improved the
quality and influence of the BJR and forge a reputation across the print and
electronic media industries that we could scarcely have dreamed of 20 years
ago.

Look back across those two decades and reflect on the completely
different media scene then prevailing: no web, no blogging, no digitalised
global communication system bringing information within instant and easy
reach. Even the computer itself was still in its infancy, with journalists on a
steep learning curve towards properly harnessing it. Since then the
unparalleled revolution in global communication has brought a
transformation that has changed our planet, the way we live and conduct our
affairs and, indeed, the entire culture of journalism. We were hardly on the
foothills of any of this when BJR was launched.

When this journal started, nobody seriously talked about “the end of
newspapers” or “the death of print journalism”. Rupert Murdoch’s Wapping
Revolution had lifted a curtain on what might be possible in the future
following the death of hot metal, even if my generation of journalists
remained locked within old habits that had been our life experience.

As the founding group – Hugo Young, Hugh Stephenson, Ivor Gaber,
Laurie Flynn, James Curran and I – sat one evening 21 years ago in the bar of
the Charing Cross Hotel planning the birth of this journal, those around the
table were consumed with improving the quality of our trade, challenging its
professional inadequacies and questioning the superficiality of much that
was then being offered in the name of journalism.

Our principal objective was to ask fellow journalists if the deeper values
of our trade were being corrupted by sloppy, superficial journalism that
often reflected the way our industry was managed and owned. And to
question what the real relationship was between journalists and those with
political power. Had some of us become a touch over-mighty in that complex
relationship? No one around that bar 21 years ago believed we soon might
reach a point when there would be a serious doubt about the very future of
newspapers and even the traditional electronic news media. Today we live on
a different planet, yet all those questions remain as relevant and as important
as they seemed to us in the 1980s.

Although The Guardian’s media section predates us by a decade, such
sections in the national press had yet to make the impact that would come
with online expansion. Some political weeklies published columns of press
criticism, mostly undistinguished. This was the period that brought the
curtain down on old Fleet Street and its famed watering holes as companies
relocated away from their traditional “village” homes, while television news
coverage and comment continued to be dominated by talents largely drawn
still from newspaper journalism.

In the wings, bright minds were sparking with ideas that would produce
the worldwide web, Microsoft, Google, the blogosphere, sophisticated
mobile telephone technology and, yes, YouTube and Twitter. Everything
was changing: rapidly, fundamentally. That was the mood music
accompanying the birth of a media forum with lots of aspiration but slim
resources. Now we inhabit a very different media world, but one no less in
need of the qualities offered by this journal. In fact, we believe the need is
greater than ever.

In numerous editorials in its early days, the BJR argued that there could
be only one response to a changing media landscape that threatened to dilute
the trade and shred traditional values and ideals: courage combined with the
excellence of journalism and journalists. Easy to say, far more difficult to
effect. And – no sanctimony here – it remains a central truth. There has never
been, never will be, an easy way ahead, but the conviction at the core of this
journal when it began remains unaltered.

Geoffrey Goodman, founding editor, chairman emeritus