In Defence of Journalism. The Old-Fashioned Kind.

When I started this Sub Stack 4 years ago, I called it ‘Letters from Suzanne’ as I didn’t really know who I was writing to or for. I envisaged a bunch of people in a pub, a pub with a fire in it. Sometimes it does feel like that, sometimes though I write more fiery stuff myself. It changes week by week.

Some of you came here because you knew my journalism and some of you because you supported my stance on women’s rights and were dismayed that I could no longer write in The Guardian, which is of course free to read.

For me, though finally leaving that paper was a liberation. I didn’t tell everyone at first, I just changed my Twitter bio to a line out of one of my favourite songs The Sweetest Girl by Scritti Politti. “She left because she understood the value of defiance”.

God , I love Green’s lyrics. The whole verse goes:

The weakest link in every chain

I always want to find it

The strongest words in each belief

Find out what's behind it

Politics is prior to

The vagaries of science

She left because she understood

The value of defiance

Anyway, I went to The Telegraph, a right wing paper that promised me that I could say what I wanted and I started this. The Telegraph has a paywall and I charge for this, some of the time, as you know. This is how I earn my living and when I look around and see what is happening to what I do and what I love: journalism, I feel lucky on a personal level but distraught on any kind of macro level.

 My upset is at the obvious decline of my industry, not just in terms of print sales but it is about more than that. The retreat into silos of the regurgitated positions of right and left - whatever those terms currently mean -  is a loss. We cannot talk about “legacy media” without talking about social media, but we cannot bemoan the polarisation of that landscape, the accusations of echo chambers, fake news and all the rest ,when the mainstream media itself does the same thing.