THE national health emergency, along with the faltering economy, have placed a more onerous responsibility than ever on the need by the media to report events as faithfully as possible, as well as making sure the govern­ment is held to account.

Here there is disappointment – too often TV news channels and dailies – with, perhaps the exception of the Financial Times – have far too often failed to expose the shambling failures by the government to get to deal with the Covid pandemic.

Only in the last few days, weeks after it was clearly to be seen, has some of the media blown the scandal of £12 billion wasted on trace-and-track contracts handed over to private companies.

The local media, too, has its responsibilities. We at this newspaper do our very best to live up to them.

What could be said to set us apart from practically every other mainstream medium? Principally, we do not exist simply in terms of production for profit. We are not privately owned. We have no shareholders or proprietor who, effectively, dictate what happens with the newspaper.

That, essentially, along with our commitment to do our best to truthfully report events locally and always willing to hold the local authority or other powers to account, is the reason why we believe we have been accepted by the community.

In the face of the health and economic crisis, owners of other local weeklies have slashed staff, closed titles, anything to protect their profit base. We have avoided all that carnage.

The New Journal’s 2,000th edition is out this week

We were born with a different creed 38 years ago. We came out of a strike involving the original staff of the Camden Journal who were given the title at a peppercorn price as part of the settlement.

We were registered as a company limited by guarantee – recognised as a type of non-profit organisation – designed by the now defunct Co-operative Development Agency, under the guidance of David Offenbach, a lawyer, and then a Camden Labour councillor.

But, again, unlike other newspaper publishers, the aims and principles set out in our Articles of Association at Company’s House point to our adherence to the idealism of the 19th-century radicals who believed in the concept of the common ownership of “commerce, agriculture and industry”.

We believe fervently in the powers of democracy and debate – that is why we pioneered the well-known letters pages from residents, unmatched in our opinion, and led several public campaigns to save University College Hospital in the 1990s from closure, a similar fate for the Whittington Hospital A&E, and support most council tenants who opposed a plan to transfer them to an outside management team.

The New Journal’s Save Our Whittington battle bus

There are countless other campaigns we have been honourably associated with. It may be thought that the present economic system needs to be radically reformed if it is to survive – and we need to do something similar.

We are exploring the idea that, apart from the internal procedures at the newspaper, there should be an outside body of “trustees”, representing the community, which would act as a kind of “parental” body aimed at keeping an eye, as it were, on the newspaper to ensure that it followed, as a faithfully as possible, the aims and principles that led to its birth in 1982.

It’s a radical step, still to be tested.

It would mean that the community, as a whole, would play a part in the life of the newspaper, in a way it has never done before – it would not, and should not, infringe on the basics of press freedom, but simply have a voice to make sure we remain independent and adherents to the principles of those idealists so long ago.