Last year’s Readers’ Appeal helped The Tablet to weather the Covid storm. The broadcaster and writer Edward Stourton explains why he has agreed to lead a new campaign to ask for your help so that we can come through the lockdown and carry forward the projects which will secure our future
This time last year we were in the middle of our Readers’ Appeal, and those of you who gave so generously may remember our ambitions. We wanted to ensure that The Tablet had a sustainable future – like most weeklies we were feeling the pressure of falling paper circulation – but we also wanted The Tablet’s voice to reach a wider, younger and more international audience.
The Coronavirus crisis has, in ways we could never have expected, underlined just how important that voice is. Anyone who works in journalism will tell you that this story has hit like an express train. On BBC Radio Four’s Sunday programme we have been discussing subjects which, until a few short weeks ago, would have been unimaginable: the public celebration of great religious festivals from Easter to Ramadan being banned; services in churches closed down; doctors facing life and death decisions about which of their patients should be treated.