By Siobhain Butterworth

To mark the 20th anniversary of the Guardian readers’ editor role, the incumbent asked his three predecessors to recall their time in the post. In the second instalment, Siobhain Butterworth looks at how the growth of online comments by readers and the online permanence of articles affected her work.

Only a couple of fragmented memories survived the grilling I underwent from the Scott Trust when I applied for the job of readers’ editor: Alan Rusbridger, the then editor-in-chief, popping his head round the door of the interview room to say, “The doctor will see you now”; and Will Hutton telling me afterwards that the column I’d submitted with my application wasn’t all that.

If done right, the job can be lonely-ish: journalists are naturally a bit wary when the internal regulator comes to call. But, on the plus side, I had freedom to roam and was out of reach of even the most senior editors because, under the rules, only the Scott Trust could sack me.

Introducing the Guardian to this system of self-regulation, Rusbridger recognised that as an editor it was “a very radical move to place even a few inches of your paper out of your control”. But it was absolutely necessary to safeguard the independence of the readers’ editor, and he was true to his word.

When I took over from the unimpeachable Ian Mayes, the Guardian was already firmly ensconced in the digital world, but its relationship with its audience was changing fast. Comment is Free, then just over a year old, had heralded a shift in the journalist/reader dynamic. Guardian users were responding to web content, sometimes shouting back and yelling at each other in comments below the article. The website had become the place for journalists and readers to coexist.

Around this time, the archetypal Guardian reader seemed to be disappearing. The site was attracting millions of global users and it was apparent from the complaints I received that some readers were unfamiliar with the newspaper’s values and traditions. 

And, as I discovered when I dealt with complaints about changes to the homepage, the majority of Guardian users were not accessing its online articles that way. People were finding our web content in different ways, not browsing the whole, and many had a fragmented view of the Guardian as a result of getting isolated articles through social media or alerts to which they’d signed up.

In this changing landscape there was still plenty of thinking to be done about online ethical issues, such as invisible mending versus flagging corrections, or whether changes to older articles should be made so that certain types of content, for example restaurant reviews and reports of criminal convictions, did not come up in search results. 

We were also still grappling with the question of how user comments should be moderated. And whereas print corrections to flawed journalism had previously been the norm, now complaints were usually accompanied by requests to delete online articles.

All of these things settled down over time, but during my stint as readers’ editor, the reach and longevity of online publication was still a major issue. I returned to the subject in various guises several times, and one of my columns was even quoted at length in a high court libel judgment.

Children and young people were particularly affected, and I dealt with several cases in which articles had become a source of embarrassment for them. This led to changes to the Guardian’s editorial code to protect children from embarrassment or harm as they grew older, and to require that even anonymised articles containing significant intrusions into children’s private lives should have a strong public interest justification. These provisions extended to journalists who were writing about their own children, something of a phenomenon at the time.

The readers’ editor needs help to engage with the huge numbers of emails arriving every week. My able assistants were Helen Hodgson, Barbara Harper and Charlotte Dewar. We were later joined by Leslie Plommer, a highly experienced newswoman, whose dedication to Guardian readers was seemingly boundless and who wisely opined that the product of journalism is its readers.