‘No former period, in the history of our Country, has been marked by the agitation of questions of a more important character than those which are now claiming the attention of the public.” So began the announcement, nearly 200 years ago, of a brand-new newspaper to be published in Manchester, England, which proclaimed that “the spirited discussion of political questions” and “the accurate detail of facts” were “particularly important at this juncture”.

Now we are living through another extraordinary period in history: one defined by dazzling political shocks and the disruptive impact of new technologies in every part of our lives. The public sphere has changed more radically in the past two decades than in the previous two centuries – and news organisations, including this one, have worked hard to adjust.

But the turbulence of our time may demand that we do more than adapt. The circumstances in which we report, produce, distribute and obtain the news have changed so dramatically that this moment requires nothing less than a serious consideration of what we do and why we do it.

The Scott Trust, which owns the Guardian, stated a very clear purpose when it was established in 1936: “to secure the financial and editorial independence of the Guardian in perpetuity and to safeguard the journalistic freedom and liberal values of the Guardian free from commercial or political interference.” As an editor, it’s hard to imagine a finer mission for a proprietor: our sole shareholder is committed only to our journalistic freedom and longterm survival.

But if the mission of the Scott Trust is to ensure that Guardian journalism will exist for ever, it is still left to us to define what the mission of that journalism will be. What is the meaning and purpose of our work? What role do we play in society?

After working at the Guardian for two decades, I feel I know instinctively why it exists. Most of our journalists and our readers do, too – it’s something to do with holding power to account, and upholding liberal values. We know what defines a Guardian story, what feels like a Guardian perspective, what makes something “very Guardian” (for better and for worse).

In my own work as editor of the Guardian in Australia, and then as the editor of the Guardian in the US, I tried to conceptualise the Guardian with a different accent – to identify the essential qualities of Guardian journalism and bring them to new audiences. Now, as the editor-in-chief of the Guardian and the Observer, I believe our time requires something deeper. It is more urgent than ever to ask: who are we, fundamentally?

The answer to this question is in our past, our present and our future. I want to lead a Guardian that relates to the world in a way that reflects our history, engages deeply with this disorientating global moment, and is sustainable for ever.

The history of the Guardian begins on 16 August 1819, when John Edward Taylor, a 28-year-old English journalist, attended an enormous demonstration for parliamentary reform in Manchester. In St Peter’s Field, a popular radical speaker, Henry Hunt, addressed a crowd estimated to contain 60,000 people – more than half the population of the Manchester area at the time, dressed in their Sunday best and packed in so tightly that their hats were said to be touching.

At the time, the mood in the country was insurrectionary. The French revolution, three decades earlier, had spread throughout the world the seismic idea that ordinary people could face down the powerful and win – a revelation for the masses and a fright for those in power. After Britain’s victory at Waterloo and the end of the Napoleonic wars, the country was mired in economic depression and high unemployment, while the Corn Laws, which kept the price of grain artificially high, brought mass hunger. There were protests and riots throughout the country, from handloom weavers trashing newly invented factory machinery to anti-slavery campaigners boycotting sugar.

There was also a growing campaign for the vote: the big, densely populated city of Manchester had no member of parliament – while Old Sarum, a prosperous hamlet in southern England, with just one voter, had two MPs to represent him. The city’s businessmen were demanding an overhaul of this rotten system – and working men (and, for the first time, women) wanted their own chance to vote.

The combination of economic depression, political repression and the politicisation of workers with economic need was combustible. As the essayist William Hazlitt wrote one year earlier, “nothing that was established was to be tolerated … the world was to be turned topsy-turvy.”

The Peterloo massacre of 1819. Photograph: Courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives

As most of Manchester gathered in St Peter’s Field on 16 August, the city’s magistrates, intimidated by the size of the crowd and their demands, ordered armed cavalry to charge into the crowd – to break up the meeting and arrest Hunt and other speakers on the podium. The troops stormed through the people, hacking with their sabres and “cutting at everyone they could reach”. Eleven people were killed on the day, seven men and four women, and many hundreds were injured. It became known as the Peterloo massacre or the Battle of Peterloo, and its impact was huge: the historian AJP Taylor said that Peterloo “began the breakup of the old order in England”.

John Edward Taylor was in the crowd that day, reporting for a weekly paper, the Manchester Gazette. When a reporter for the daily Times of London was arrested, Taylor was concerned that the people of the capital might not get an accurate report of the massacre – he correctly feared that without the account of a journalist on the scene, Londoners would instead get only the official version of events, which would protect the magistrates who had caused the bloodshed.

So Taylor rushed a report on to the night coach to London, got it into the Times, and thus turned a Manchester demonstration into a national scandal. Taylor exposed the facts, without hysteria. By reporting what he had witnessed, he told the stories of the powerless, and held the powerful to account.

But Taylor did not stop there. After the massacre, he spent months reporting on the fate of the wounded, documenting the injuries of more than 400 survivors.

Quick Guide What was the Peterloo massacre? Show What was the Peterloo Massacre and how many were killed? On 16 August 1819, up to 60,000 working class people from the towns and villages of what is now Greater Manchester marched to St Peters Fields in central Manchester to demand political representation. Their peaceful protest turned bloody when Manchester magistrates ordered Yeoman – a private militia paid for by rich locals – to storm the crowd with sabres. Most historians agree that 14 people were definitely killed in the massacre – 15 if you include the unborn child of Elizabeth Gaunt, killed in the womb after she was beaten by constables in custody. A further three named people are believed to have either been stabbed or trampled to death. Why is it called Peterloo? The name was first coined five days after the massacre by James Wroe, editor of the Manchester Observer, the city’s first radical newspaper (no relation to the Observer of today). According to historian Robert Poole, Peterloo was “a bitter pun, comparing the cowardly attacks by the Yeomanry and soldiers on unarmed civilians to the brutality suffered at Waterloo.” What did the protesters want? They wanted political reform. The years leading up to Peterloo had been tough for working class people and they wanted a voice in parliament to put their needs and wants on the political agenda, inspired by the French Revolution across the Channel. Machines had begun to take jobs in the lucrative cotton industry but periodic trade slumps closed factories at short notice, putting workers out on the street. The Napoleonic Wars, which ended in 1815 with the Battle of Waterloo, had taken a heavy toll on the nation’s finances, and 350,000 ex-servicemen returned home needing jobs and food. Yet those in power seemed more interested in lining their own pockets than helping the poor. At that point, only the richest landowners could vote, and large swathes of the country were not represented in Westminster. Manchester and Salford, which then had a population of 150,000, had no MP, yet Oxford and Cambridge Universities had their own representation. At the time the extension of the vote to all men, let alone women, was actively opposed by many who thought the vote should be restricted to those of influence and means. Why is Peterloo important? It paved the way for parliamentary democracy and particularly the Great Reform Act of 1832 which created new parliamentary seats, particularly in the industrial towns of the north of England. It also led to the establishment two years later of the Manchester Guardian by John Edward Taylor, a 28-year-old English journalist who was present at the massacre and saw how the “establishment” media sought to discredit the protesters. Helen Pidd, North of England editor Photograph: Rischgitz/Hulton Archive

Taylor’s relentless effort to tell the full story of Peterloo strengthened his own reformist political views – and he became determined to agitate for fair representation in parliament. He decided to start his own newspaper, the Manchester Guardian, with the financial backing of other middle-class radicals (10 put up £100 each, and an 11th contributed £50). The first edition was published on 5 May 1821, devoted to enlightenment values, liberty, reform and justice. It was launched with great confidence and optimism, by a man who believed that, “in spite of Peterloo and police spies, reason was great and would prevail”.

The Manchester Guardian was founded in a mood of great hope, and faith in ordinary people. The manifesto that Taylor produced before the paper’s launch speaks powerfully of the “great diffusion of Education” that was taking place, and “the greatly increased interest which political subjects excite, and the immense extension of the circle within which they are discussed. It is of the utmost importance that this increased interest should be turned to beneficial account”.

It is a powerful document, and one whose ideals still shape the Guardian – a celebration of more people getting educated, of more people engaging in politics, from different walks of life, from poorer communities. And it is a document that articulates a sense of responsibility to the public – that the Manchester Guardian could engage with the people who were starting to become involved in politics, giving them the information they need to take action. It is a wholly uncynical and unsnobbish document. It is on people’s side.

In the decades following Taylor’s death in 1844, the Manchester Guardian began to drift from the political ideals that had inspired its founding. It was highly profitable, but in becoming so it got too close to the Manchester cotton merchants who paid for the advertising that supported the paper. It even sided with the slave-owning south in the American civil war: the paper demanded that the Manchester cotton workers who starved in the streets because they refused to touch cotton picked by American slaves should be forced back into work. (Abraham Lincoln wrote to the “working men of Manchester” in 1863 to thank them for their “sublime Christian heroism, which has not been surpassed in any age or in any country”.)

This period of complacency for the Guardian was dramatically ended by the appointment as editor of CP Scott, who transformed the paper and helped establish the political commitments that have been so important to its identity ever since.

Scott was made editor in 1872, at the age of 25. He was a radical Liberal and party activist who cared greatly about social justice and pacifism. Scott faced two big ideological challenges during the 57 years of his editorship; and his response to both helped form the Guardian as it is today.

The first was the question of Irish Home Rule: on the most contentious issue of the time, which split the Liberal party in the 1880s, Scott campaigned for self-government in Ireland – marking the moment, according to the historian David Ayerst, when the Guardian most clearly became “a paper of the Left”. At the end of the 19th century, Scott took the Guardian to an even more controversial anti-colonial position. During the second Boer war, from 1899 to 1902, Britain was rampantly jingoistic; anyone who opposed the war was cast as a traitor. The Guardian stood against it and ran a campaign for peace, while the brilliant Guardian reporter Emily Hobhouse exposed the concentration camps for the Boers run by the British.

The prospectus published in advance of the first edition of the Manchester Guardian in 1821. Photograph: University of Manchester Library

The paper’s stance was so controversial that it lost advertisers and one-seventh of its sales. One rival paper, confident that the Guardian was on the verge of collapse, sent a brass band to stand outside our offices in Cross Street, Manchester to play Handel’s mournful Dead March from Saul.

Scott’s courageous position nearly did kill the Guardian. But in standing up to the prevailing political mood of the day, Scott turned the newspaper into “the dominant expression of radical thinking among educated men and women”, as Ayerst wrote. “Clearly this was a paper that could not be bought.”

As Scott orientated the paper towards a more radical position – away from laissez-faire liberalism to what was known as “New Liberalism”, concerned with social justice and welfare – he set the Guardian on the progressive path it has maintained, with a few missteps, ever since.

One of those missteps came in 1948. Surprising as it may seem today, the Manchester Guardian disparaged the foundation of Britain’s National Health Service. While supporting the changes as a “great step forward”, the Guardian feared that the state providing welfare “risks an increase in the proportion of the less gifted”. Three years later, the paper went further and backed the Conservatives at the 1951 general election. (Historians believe that these decisions came about because the editor at the time, AP Wadsworth, loathed Nye Bevan, the passionate Labour politician behind the welfare state.)

Making sense of a political moment when you’re in the midst of it is difficult – even if you avoid commercial and personal conflicts, it can still be hard to see it and understand it. A news organisation might often get things wrong – it needs some core values and principles to stick to in order to try to get it right.

Quick Guide A Guardian timeline Show 1821 In April, a prospectus announces a new paper for Manchester. A month later, on 5 May 1821, John Edward Taylor publishes the first Manchester Guardian as a newspaper in the liberal interest. 1872 Charles Prestwich Scott, a liberal thinker with strong principles, becomes editor of the Guardian - a post he holds for 57 years. 1907 CP Scott buys the Guardian, becoming both owner and editor. 1921 CP Scott writes a leading article to mark the centenary of the paper that becomes recognised around the world as the blueprint for independent journalism and includes the line “Comment is free, but facts are sacred.” 1929 CP Scott retires as editor in favour of his son Ted. 1932​ CP Scott’s death in January is followed swiftly by that of his younger son; Ted Scott is killed in a tragic boating accident in April. William Percival Crozier is appointed as editor. 1936 Ownership of the Manchester Guardian is transferred to the Scott Trust to protect the paper, its independence and the journalistic principles of CP Scott. ​1944 Following WP Crozier’s death, Alfred Powell Wadsworth becomes editor. ​1956 Alastair Hetherington becomes editor following Wadsworth’s death. 1959 On 24 August the newspaper changes its title from the Manchester Guardian to the Guardian, to reflect the growing importance of national and international affairs in the newspaper. 1964 The editor’s office and major editorial departments relocate from Manchester to London. ​1975 Peter Preston is appointed editor.​ 1988 The Guardian has a radical redesign, splitting the newspaper into two sections and introducing a new masthead. 1995 Alan Rusbridger becomes editor. 1999 Guardian Unlimited (GU) network of websites is launched. 2005 The mid-sized Berliner format newspaper launched. It is the UK's first full-colour national newspaper. 2011 A new digital operation, Guardian US, is launched in New York as a hub for Guardian readers in the US. 2013 The Guardian launches Australian digital edition, Guardian Australia. 2015 Katharine Viner is appointed Guardian editor-in-chief. 2018 The Guardian and Observer newspapers launch in a new tabloid format and the website and apps are given a redesign. - Photograph: The Guardian

Many of these core values were laid out by Scott on the 100th birthday of the Guardian, with his justly celebrated centenary essay of 1921. It was here that Scott introduced the famous phrase “comment is free, but facts are sacred”, and decreed that “the voice of opponents no less than that of friends has a right to be heard”. It was here that he laid out the values of the Guardian: honesty, cleanness [integrity], courage, fairness, a sense of duty to the reader and a sense of duty to the community.

CP Scott’s essay, like John Edward Taylor’s foundational prospectus, is both powerful and hopeful; as Scott writes, “the newspaper has a moral as well as a material existence”.

Our moral conviction, as exemplified by Taylor and codified by Scott, rests on a faith that people long to understand the world they’re in, and to create a better one. We believe in the value of the public sphere; that there is such a thing as the public interest, and the common good; that we are all of equal worth; that the world should be free and fair.

These inspiring ideas have always been at the heart of the Guardian at its best – whether the paper is called the Manchester Guardian or the Guardian, the name it adopted in 1959 – and they are enshrined in our independent ownership structure, in which the Guardian is owned solely by the Scott Trust. Any money made must be spent on journalism. (The Observer, of course, has its own distinct and honourable history and perspective – and as part of the same company, we are close siblings, but not twins.)

This is the mission that has motivated so many of the great moments in Guardian history, from our independent reporting of the Spanish civil war to the dramatic Edward Snowden revelations; from taking an anti-colonial position in the Suez crisis to standing up to Rupert Murdoch, the police and politicians in the phone-hacking scandal; from sending Jonathan Aitken to jail to the Panama and Paradise Papers.

These values, beliefs and ideas are well-established and enduring. They do not, by themselves, tell us how to meet the moral urgency of this new era. The world we knew has been pulled out of shape, and we must ask what it means to uphold these values now – as journalists and as citizens – and how they will inform our journalism and purpose.

Almost 200 years have passed since the public meeting that sparked Peterloo. But the past three decades – since the invention of the world wide web in 1989 – have transformed our idea of the public in ways that John Edward Taylor and CP Scott could not have imagined.

This technological revolution was exciting and inspiring. After 600 years of the Gutenberg era, when mass communication was dominated by established and hierarchical sources of information, the web felt like a breath of fresh air: open, creative, egalitarian. As its creator, Tim Berners-Lee, put it, “this is for everyone”. At first, it felt like the beginning of a thrilling new era of hyper-connectivity, with all the world’s knowledge at our fingertips and every person empowered to participate – as if the internet was one big town square where all our problems could be solved and everyone helped each other.

While many news organisations saw the internet as a threat to the old hierarchies of authority, forward-looking editors like Alan Rusbridger, who led the Guardian from 1995 until 2015, embraced this hopeful new future for journalism, by investing in digital expansion – hiring engineers and product managers – and by understanding that journalists, in this new world, must be open to challenge and debate from their audience. From making the Guardian the first British news organisation to employ a readers’ editor to launching an opinion site that inverted the traditional model of top-down newspaper commentary, he put the Guardian at the forefront of digital innovation and the changed relationships of this new era. As I wrote four years ago in my essay The Rise of the Reader, the open web created genuinely new possibilities for journalism – and journalists who resisted the technological revolution would damage both their own interests and the interests of good journalism.

But it has become clear that the utopian mood of the early 2000s did not anticipate all that technology would enable. Our digital town squares have become mobbed with bullies, misogynists and racists, who have brought a new kind of hysteria to public debate. Our movements and feelings are constantly monitored, because surveillance is the business model of the digital age. Facebook has become the richest and most powerful publisher in history by replacing editors with algorithms – shattering the public square into millions of personalised news feeds, shifting entire societies away from the open terrain of genuine debate and argument, while they make billions from our valued attention.

This shift presents big challenges for liberal democracy. But it presents particular problems for journalism.

The transition from print to digital did not initially change the basic business model for many news organisations – that is, selling advertisements to fund the journalism delivered to readers. For a time, it seemed that the potentially vast scale of an online audience might compensate for the decline in print readers and advertisers. But this business model is currently collapsing, as Facebook and Google swallow digital advertising; as a result, the digital journalism produced by many news organisations has become less and less meaningful.

Publishers that are funded by algorithmic ads are locked in a race to the bottom in pursuit of any audience they can find – desperately binge-publishing without checking facts, pushing out the most shrill and most extreme stories to boost clicks. But even this huge scale can no longer secure enough revenue.

On some sites, journalists who learned in training that “news is something that someone, somewhere doesn’t want published” churn out 10 commodified stories a day without making a phone call. “Where once we had propaganda, press releases, journalism, and advertising,” the academic Emily Bell has written, “we now have ‘content’.” Readers are overwhelmed: bewildered by the quantity of “news” they see every day, nagged by intrusive pop-up ads, confused by what is real and what is fake, and confronted with an experience that is neither useful nor enjoyable.

Many people get most of their news from Facebook, which means that information arrives in one big stream – which may contain fact-based independent journalism from transparent sources alongside invented stories from a click farm, or content funded by malevolent actors to influence an election. The Richmond Standard, a website in California’s Bay Area, describes itself as a “community-driven daily news source”. If you see one of its headlines in your news feed, you couldn’t possibly know that it is owned by the multinational oil giant Chevron – which, according to the Financial Times, also owns “the Richmond refinery that in August 2012 caught fire, spewing plumes of black smoke over the city and sending more than 15,000 residents to hospital for medical help”. Such arrangements are no longer remarkable: the Australian Football League employs about 30 journalists to write friendly stories. Many free local newspapers in the UK are funded by the very councils they should be holding to account. It is asking a lot of individuals to sift the real from the fake when they are bombarded by information – how do they know who to trust?

Trust in all kinds of established institutions – including the media – is at an historic low. This is not a blip, and it should not be a surprise, when so many institutions have failed the people who trusted them and responded to criticism with contempt. As a result, people feel outraged but powerless – nothing they do seems to stop these things happening, and nobody seems to be listening to their stories.

This has created a crisis for public life, and particularly for the press, which risks becoming wholly part of the same establishment that the public no longer trusts. At a moment when people are losing faith in their ability to participate in politics and make themselves heard, the media can play a critical role in reversing that sense of alienation.

“If mistrust in institutions is changing how people participate in civics, news organisations might need to change as well,” the MIT professor Ethan Zuckerman has argued. “We could rethink our role as journalists as helping people … find the places where they, individually and collectively, can be the most effective and powerful.”

To do this well, journalists must work to earn the trust of those they aim to serve. And we must make ourselves more representative of the societies we aim to represent. Members of the media are increasingly drawn from the same, privileged sector of society: this problem has actually worsened in recent decades. According to the government’s 2012 report on social mobility in the UK, while most professions are still “dominated by a social elite”, journalism lags behind medicine, politics and even law in opening its doors to people from less well-off backgrounds. “Indeed,” the report concludes, “journalism has had a greater shift towards social exclusivity than any other profession.”

Grenfell Tower in west London. Photograph: Rick Findler/PA

This matters because people from exclusive, homogenous backgrounds are unlikely to know anyone adversely affected by the crises of our era, or to spend time in the places where they are happening. Media organisations staffed largely by people from narrow backgrounds are less likely to recognise the issues that people notice in their communities every day as “news”; the discussions inside such organisations will inevitably be shaped by the shared privilege of the participants.

After 71 people died in the devastating Grenfell Tower fire in west London – which residents had forewarned for years – the Channel 4 News presenter Jon Snow said that the failure to attend to these warnings showed that the media was “comfortably with the elite, with little awareness, contact or connection with those not of the elite.” As Gary Younge, the Guardian editor-at-large, has put it: “‘They’ are not ‘us’ – ‘their’ views are not often heard in newsrooms, and they know it.”

If journalists become distant from other people’s lives, they miss the story, and people don’t trust them. The Guardian is not at all exempt from these challenges, and our staff is not diverse enough. Because of our history, values and purpose, we are committed to addressing these issues – but there is still a long way to go.

Meanwhile, those in power have exploited distrust of the media to actively undermine the role of journalism in the public interest in a democracy – from Donald Trump calling the “fake news” media “the enemy of the American people” to a British cabinet member suggesting that broadcasters should be “patriotic” in their Brexit reporting. All over the world – in Turkey, Russia, Poland, Egypt, China, Hungary, Malta and many other countries – powerful interests are on the march against free speech. Journalists are undermined, attacked, even murdered.

In these disorientating times, championing the public interest – which has always been at the heart of the Guardian’s mission – has become an urgent necessity. People are understandably anxious in the face of crises that are global, national, local and personal. At the global level, these crises are overwhelming: climate change, the refugee crisis, the rise of a powerful super-rich who bestride the global economy. It is easy to feel that humanity is facing a great shift, about which we were not consulted. Overwhelming technological, environmental, political and social change has precipitated what the philosopher Timothy Morton memorably describes as “a traumatic loss of co-ordinates” for all of us.

These global upheavals have plainly destabilised national politics, producing the shocks and surprises of the past two years: the unexpected result of the Brexit referendum, which leaves Britain facing a deeply uncertain future; the stunning election of Donald Trump; the collapse of support for traditional parties across Europe, and the unexpected rise of Emmanuel Macron. These events confounded the experts and the insiders who confidently declared them impossible. In the UK, Jeremy Corbyn appeared to have torn up the rulebook that had governed electoral politics for two decades – finding a surge of support in the June snap election, particularly with young people, by promoting socialist ideas that had long been dismissed. Bernie Sanders tapped into a similar mood in the US Democratic primary.

Skyrocketing inequality between the rich and poor has bred resentment at the political and economic establishment. In October it was revealed that the world’s super-rich now hold the greatest concentration of wealth for 120 years – many of them taking elaborate steps to avoid tax in the process, as the Paradise Papers showed.

What is becoming clear is that the way things have been run is unsustainable. We are at a turning point in which, in writer Naomi Klein’s words, “the spell of neoliberalism has been broken, crushed under the weight of lived experience and a mountain of evidence”. (Klein defines neoliberalism as “shorthand for an economic project that vilifies the public sphere”.) Perhaps the markets don’t have all the answers after all. The Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf, who says that many had not understood how “radical the implications” of worsening inequality would be, suggests that the political backlash to globalisation could possibly produce a “fundamental transformation of the world – at least as significant as the one that brought about the first world war and the Russian revolution.”

In many local areas, in our neighbourhoods and our communities, we see the collapse of civic life, from public space sold off cheaply to developers to the closing of libraries to the underfunding of schools and hospitals. It is not hard to imagine what has produced the growing tide of resentment that has shaken our politics. It is painful to see the rich getting away with it in the big cities while you’re struggling in your small town. Older people lament the loss of community life; younger people are unlikely to be able to find a good job or afford somewhere decent to live.

All of these dislocations have led to another set of crises at a personal level. This year, the World Health Organisation announced that cases of depression had ballooned in the past decade, making it the leading cause of disability worldwide. Loneliness is now being recognised as an epidemic throughout the west.

Our lives are increasingly atomised, but you can see the pleasure that comes from communal or civic participation. People long to help each other, to be together, to share experiences, to be part of a community, to influence the powers that control their lives. But in everyday life, such togetherness is hard to achieve: workplaces in the era of the gig economy no longer offer a solid place to gather; religion has declined; technology means that we often communicate via screens rather than face-to-face.

This is a dangerous moment: these are fertile grounds for authoritarianism and fascistic movements, and it’s no surprise that people feel anxious and confused. The desire to belong can just as easily find a home in dark places; new ways of participating can just as easily be used to foster hate.

But it is the presence of all these crises that recalls AJP Taylor’s remark that Peterloo “began the breakup of the old order” – and I cannot help wondering if this is another such moment. After the fever of Peterloo, amid mass demands for the vote, the Manchester Guardian caught the mood of the people, and found a way to respond – not to deny what was happening or minimise it, but to acknowledge it, contextualise it, analyse it, try to understand it, to “turn it to beneficial account”.

The urgent question now, then, is how the Guardian should do that today.

One response to this crisis is despair and escapism: to bury our heads in our phones, or watch some dystopian TV. Another is to declare that the whole system is broken, and everything must be torn down – a view whose popularity may partly explain our recent political tremors.

But despair is just another form of denial. People long to feel hopeful again – and young people, especially, yearn to feel the hope that previous generations once had.

Hope does not mean naively denying reality, as Rebecca Solnit explains in her inspiring book Hope in the Dark. “Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists,” Solnit writes. It’s a belief that actions have meaning and that what we do matters. “Authentic hope,” she says, “requires clarity and imagination.”

American football players Eli Harold, Colin Kaepernick and Eric Reid kneeling during the US national anthem to protest against police brutality Photograph: John G Mabanglo/EPA

Hope, above all, is a faith in our capacity to act together to make change. To do this, we need to be bold. “Not everything that is faced can be changed,” James Baldwin wrote in 1962. “But nothing can be changed until it is faced.” We need to accept the limits of the old kind of power, and work out what the new kinds will be. We need to be engaged with the world, uncynical, unsnobbish, on people’s side: just like the 1821 manifesto that established the Guardian.

Because people are not powerless to change things, and they are finding ways to act – new ways to get involved, to be citizens – it’s just that it might not be the kind of civic action that we’re used to. It might be American football players taking a knee to protest against police violence; it might be the people of Iceland, swarming around their parliament building banging pots and pans to bring down the government that bungled their country’s financial crash. It might be university students demanding divestment from fossil fuels, or the spread of small-scale renewable energy projects across the developing world. It might be digital activists building powerful new encryption tools in the wake of the Snowden revelations. This kind of action might not look like politics as we know it – but it’s politics all the same. These are new forms of engagement and participation, new ways to be an engaged citizen.

If people long to understand the world, then news organisations must provide them with clarity: facts they can trust, information that they need, reported and written and edited with care and precision.

If people long to create a better world, then we must use our platform to nurture imagination – hopeful ideas, fresh alternatives, belief that the way things are isn’t the way things need to be. We cannot merely criticise the status quo; we must also explore the new ideas that might displace it. We must build hope.

To do this, the Guardian will embrace as wide a range of progressive perspectives as possible. We will support policies and ideas, but we will not give uncritical backing to parties or individuals. We will also engage with and publish voices from the right. In an age of tumultuous change, nobody has a monopoly on good ideas.

But our guiding focus, especially in countries such as Britain, the US and Australia, will be to challenge the economic assumptions of the past three decades, which have extended market values such as competition and self-interest far beyond their natural sphere and seized the public realm. We will explore other principles and avenues through which to organise society for the common good.

In doing this, we want nuance and knowledge, surprises and context and history, because power and influence might not reside where they used to; as identities change, the political assumptions of the recent past should not dictate our perspective on the present. We should be guided by curiosity, not certainty. We like experts, but that’s not enough; we must also ask why more people don’t.

This kind of journalism, which champions the public interest, requires a deep understanding of the changes taking place, so we will continually find the best ways to listen to people, even – perhaps especially – those who don’t read us. This is why it is essential that we have a staff that is representative of the society to which we all belong. We need to ensure our journalists will find and hear different stories, have different instincts, gain different insights, make different connections, give voice to the silenced, cover areas and topics that are neglected – in other words, make our journalism better.

We do this by taking people seriously and treating our subjects, sources and readers with respect. Our relationship with our readers is not transactional: it is about sharing a sense of purpose and a commitment to understand and illuminate our times.

Supporting the Guardian – via subscriptions, contributions or membership – is only one way to participate in our mission. We are inviting our readers to be part of a community, whether that means reading and listening to and watching and sharing our work, or responding to it, or by sending us anonymous information or participating in a reporting project. We will also collaborate with news organisations – and others – who are doing work in the public interest.

We must embrace the new ways that people are engaging in the world, not long for a lost past when the ballot box and a handful of powerful media was the end of the story. As Ethan Zuckerman says, “if news organisations can help make citizens feel powerful, like they can make effective civic change, they’ll develop a strength and loyalty they’ve not felt in years”.

The Guardian is now funded more by our readers than by our advertisers. This is not only a new business model. It is an opportunity to focus on what readers value in Guardian journalism: serious reporting that takes time and effort, carefully uncovers the facts, holds the powerful to account, and interrogates ideas and arguments – work that speaks to the urgency of the moment, but lasts for more than a day. Being funded by our readers means we must focus on the stories that are most meaningful. It also means that we must spend money carefully, trying to produce – as one writer described CP Scott’s ambition for the Guardian a century ago – “a great paper without any of the airs of a great paper”.

Of course, in a serious age, the appetite for thoughtful, clever features beyond the news is possibly greater than ever. Our readers want to be nourished – by meaningful journalism about technology, economics, science, the arts – not fattened up with junk. They want useful, enjoyable reporting on how we live now, spotting trends, catching the mood, understanding what people are talking about – life-affirming, inspiring, challenging. We can be fun, and we must be funny, but it must always have a point, laughing with our audience, never at them. Their attention is not a commodity to be exploited and sold.

We will give people the facts, because they want and need information they can trust, and we will stick to the facts. We will find things out, reveal new information and challenge the powerful. This is the foundation of what we do. As trust in the media declines in a combustible political moment, people around the world come to the Guardian in greater numbers than ever before, because they know us to be rigorous and fair. If we once emphasised the revolutionary idea that “comment is free”, today our priority is to ensure that “facts are sacred”. Our ownership structure means we are entirely independent and free from political and commercial influence. Only our values will determine the stories we choose to cover – relentlessly and courageously.

Migrants being rescued as they try to cross the Mediterranean sea from north Africa to Europe Photograph: Emilio Morenatti/AP

We will ask the questions that people are asking, and the questions that no one is asking. Honest reporters approach every situation with humility: they find the people who don’t get listened to and really listen to them. They get to know a place. We will get out of the big cities and the big institutions, and stay with stories for the long-term. Our commentary must also be based in facts, but we will keep a clear distinction between news and opinion.

We will provide a worthwhile space in which to read, watch, listen to and debate the issues of the day. We will be at the forefront of emerging new technologies, and will embrace those that truly benefit Guardian journalism and our readers’ experience of it. We must be proud of everything with the Guardian’s logo on it. Rather than overwhelming readers with stuff we demand they consume, we will edit for a meaningful experience. In print and in digital, we will be explanatory, visual, keepable. In recent years, the trend has been to prioritise the platforms on which journalism appears. We must now prioritise the reason for that journalism.

More than 800,000 people now help fund the Guardian, because they think what we do is important – and there are millions more who read us every day. This is inspiring, and it shows us a path towards a secure future for our journalism. We want to make sure that generations to come can read the Guardian, and that requires making our finances sustainable.

For now, we cannot predict where this political moment will lead, or what changes await. There is much about the future that we do not know.

But we do know that there are serious questions that must be answered today, and that the Guardian is well placed to do this: because of our unique independent ownership; because of our high-quality journalism, rooted in the facts; because of our progressive perspective; and because our readers believe, as we do, that Guardian journalism should have the biggest possible impact and try to change the world for the better.

To steal Rainer Maria Rilke’s phrase, we must “live the questions now”: constantly examining our assumptions, our biases, how the world is changing, what it means. To do this, we will follow five principles: we will develop ideas that help improve the world, not just critique it; we will collaborate with readers, and others, to have greater impact; we will diversify, to have richer reporting from a representative newsroom; we will be meaningful in all of our work; and, underpinning it all, we will report fairly on people as well as power and find things out.

This is a challenge: a challenge for us at the Guardian to grab these principles, develop them and use them in all we do; a challenge to Guardian readers, to engage with us, support us if you believe in us, participate, advocate; and a challenge to all media organisations, to find ways to face this moment.

In the two-and-a-half years since I became editor-in-chief, we have experienced a huge number of political and social shocks, a dramatic undermining of the business model for serious journalism, and what many believe is an unprecedented level of disruption to our planet, our nation states, our communities, ourselves. It is a searching time to be an editor, a journalist and a citizen – but also a privilege to be grappling with these questions, with a possibility of helping to turn this era into something better, to turn this moment to “beneficial account”, as our founding manifesto proclaimed. And to do what has been the mission of the Guardian since 1821: to use clarity and imagination to build hope.

• More than 800,000 readers now help fund the Guardian. Join them.

Main illustration by Michelle Thompson