i Editor's Letter: Newspaper of the year

On Wednesday night i won the Newspaper of the Year and the Newspaper Design prizes at the Newspaper Awards – best seen as the Golden Globes of our industry in relation to the Oscars (British Press Awards), where we were beaten by the Daily Mail. You can see the pleased-as-punch photos of our production guru Rhodri, art supremo Dan and the feisty Geordie designer Charlotte as they collected rather elegant glass gongs from Gabby Logan. Geordie Nick (our other designer), Scouse Carl and the rest of us were here — someone has to do the work.

So it was a good day to have my younger daughter and her friend come to the i office for the school's "take your daughter to work" day, although the newsroom was a little bit on the "delicate" side. The optimism about, and pride in, our nascent paper is in stark contrast to the pessimism and cynicism on the office screens that were set to the prolonged car-crash TV of Rupert Murdoch's explosive Day Two at the Leveson Inquiry.

A by-product of all the current inquiries is the damage done to journalism's image as a desirable career choice for our young. All the more vital then to fight a good fight and stand up for the quality journalism seen daily in the UK at many of the vibrant newspapers Murdoch himself mentioned yesterday. Journalism of this ilk - as seen in The Guardian and our sister paper, The Independent – ensured the hacking scandal and worse did not stay "covered up".

There is so much British journalism in which to take pride, but we will need to battle through months of image-tarnishing, and perhaps much heavier regulation before we can convince a sceptical public of that case.

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