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A former senior editorial executive at the Daily Telegraph explains why he thinks maintaining a superior news service is the way forward for the paper and delivers this message to the paper's new proprietors, the Barclay brothers: "I am not suggesting that the Telegraph should ditch or even reduce any of its non-news ingredients - no paper can live on news alone these days - but simply that it focuses its attention and best journalistic skills on news coverage. Yes, it is an old-fashioned idea, but sometimes those do work. During my decade on The Daily Telegraph I had to fight over and over again to preserve the paper's gothic titlepiece or masthead, which was highly distinctive and itself stood for integrity. It has survived, although slightly tweaked, and in my view the paper's reputation has benefited from this. If the Barclays drop the gothic, we will know the paper is heading for real trouble."

In 1986, when Andrew Neil called Sunday Times journalists to a meeting around the corner from the paper's Grays Inn Road offices and commanded them to go to Fortress Wapping or else — the silence was broken by a mild-mannered, bespectacled senior editor. With 17 years' service behind him, Don Berry accused Neil of treating the journalists with contempt: they had been lied to, their house agreement had been flagrantly violated, and their herding to Wapping was a Murdoch ruse to evade redundancy payments. Though Berry was cheered to the rafters, it was the end of his career with the Sunday Times. But his talents and high prinicples were quickly seized by Max Hastings, newly appointed editor of The Daily Telegraph, whose reliance on Berry then was proven later when Hastings took him to the Evening Standard. Below me publish Berry's retirement speech describing his first days on five different papers.

As newspapers struggle to secure ad revenue advertisers are calling the tune by designing ads that dominate pages to the detriment of editorial. Don Berry laments the trend and asks, possibly with tongue in cheek: why don’t proprietors and chief executives unite to resist the ad agency bullies?