ONE way or another, I have written leaders at least once for every broadsheet newspaper in London, except the Financial Times. For younger readers, “broadsheet” was a style of printing newspapers on large sheets of paper, now represented only by the FT and the Telegraph. It was meant to mark out the serious papers from the silly ones, and to distinguish news from entertainment, a link that has been decisively broken by the Telegraph today.

To write leaders is a bit like manufacturing a cryptocurrency: they have value only to the extent that people believe that they do. You can, if you make them, take delight in the technical details of their construction, whether these be sentences or cunning bits of code, but this is all irrelevant to their users.

So, who are your users? Bearing in mind that a leader is meant to warn or to advise the people actually taking decisions, you might think that these people are the target of these exhortations: that the minister, the bishop, or the Prime Minister is brought the paper in the morning by a suitably respectful underling, and sees that The Guardian is encouraged by his plans for social care, or that The Times has grave things to say about his proposed taxes. But this was nonsense even in the days when people got their news from physical papers rather than their phone screens. That was most obvious when one wrote on foreign policy. The odds against an American or Israeli government being affected by the views of The Guardian were astrological; but we had to believe that there was some connection, even if it was undetectable to gross earthly senses.

The great exception to the rule that leaders told no one who mattered anything that they might act on came in the chaotic period of the Brexit negotiations, when the German Embassy must have been informed and strengthened by the leaders in the Telegraph, which demonstrated, then as now, just how much craziness the Conservative Party would swallow rather than face reality. A similar dynamic could be found in the run-up to the Iraq war, when the pro-war newspapers, by telling their readers what they wanted them to believe, made it quite clear that war was coming and that it would be a disaster.

Both examples tend to illustrate that the real users of the leader column are not those it is written about — even if it pretends to tell them what to do — but those who read it from a position of powerlessness. It has to work with their prejudices and over time to supply a continuous narrative that shows that they have been right all along.

The people that the leader-writer wants to reach, though, are the ones that they write about, not the ones that they write for, and so they are doomed to a perpetual disappointment.

This is a shame. The leader-writers with whom I worked were, almost without exception, decent and thoughtful people, and all were smart. Their views were worth hearing, and the conversations through which we reached a collective view were often a delight. No one can be a journalist without curiosity. The business of finding out stuff from a colleague who knows what they’re talking about is something that I still miss.

BUT all this was dependent on a hierarchical information economy, in which the broadsheet, elitist newspapers worked as gatekeepers and guarantees of reliability. The warrant for thoughtful and well-informed discussions is now no longer the surrounding daily newspaper, but the writer’s byline. The process is not complete. Periodical magazines still have a reliable gatekeeping part to play, as does the FT. But, on the whole, there has been a massive disintermediation, and the bylines that you can trust can now be found anywhere on the web — though, perhaps, mostly on Substack. This brings a much closer interaction with readers, who can be managed much more successfully than on newspaper comment sites; but it brings problems, too.

For writers, the problem is financial. It was astonishing how few people actually read to the end of a Guardian leader on the web — about twice as many as I can get on a small Substack; but The Guardian paid between 30 and 80 times as much for my efforts. On the other hand, I can know that some of the people I write about the most actually subscribe, and that’s an incentive to go on. For readers, though, the problem is now the sheer volume of good stuff. When I look in the Substack folder of my email, there are now 293 unread messages, and at least half of them will be worth reading.

Er, noted. Editor.