Have the courage of your convictions (From Worcester News)

Have the courage of your convictions

8:00am Saturday 20th March 2010 in

• Skip social links
• Print
• Email
• Comments(0)

SIR – Having recently received a newsletter from VisitWorcester proclaiming that “your” Worcester Festival is coming up this summer, I feel compelled to write on this theme, which seems to have been started by “your” Worcester News in the last year or so.

Why do you (and VisitWorcester) see the need to produce a newspaper (and a festival) and then immediately abdicate responsibility for it by saying that it is “yours”, thereby implicating it is nothing to do with “us” and if it all fails it is nothing to do with us.

Newspapers (and festivals) need strong leadership. Have the courage of your convictions and say this is “the Worcester News” (and “the Worcester Festival”) – stamp some authority on it and that way you will have a lot more followers than if you try to give it the image of a self-help group with no backbone.

Rick Johns,
general manager,
Kingsway English Centre, Worcester

EDITOR’S NOTE: I cannot speak for Visit Worcester but we use the branding “your Worcester News” because we believe passionately that our newspaper belongs to its readers and has done for more than a century. They purchase it, it is about them, and they are the reason for the very existence of this newspaper.

Quite why that should be seen as an abdication of responsibility is beyond me.