Breaking News. Alan Rusbridger

engaged people. And, as for the rest, well, maybe a ten-minute skim would do.

      What, we debated over long sessions in 2003/4/5, should a news organisation do, faced with legions of apathetic readers? Give them what they want? If they don’t want difficult stuff, perhaps we shouldn’t give them difficult stuff. Or the (apocryphal?) BBC dictum: ‘Don’t give the public what they want. They deserve much better than that.’

      Maybe we needed to be smarter in differentiating what print and digital could do? We argued it both ways: keep print for a comprehensive but shallow summary, with the depth to be found online? Or (as an equal number of colleagues wanted it) that print was the medium for depth, with the internet giving you constant, but shallow, updates.

      Turn the volume up? Make the news seem more exciting, striking, pumped up? Try to shock and energise them out of their apathy?

      Was there still some notion of duty that went with the privilege of mediating the news and the argument? Did we have any kind of responsibility to tell our readers things they might not think they wanted to know? Would it matter if all newspapers started turning up the volume . . . to shout, rather than talk? Would public debate be improved, or become impossible?