Another 250,000 readers found P&I over the past year. As our August fundraising campaign begins, we’re asking readers to help keep independent journalism free, fearless and growing.

When I started in this job 18 months ago, an independent media editor whom I greatly admire gave me some advice: focus on our strengths. Don’t try to build a more diverse group of readers and authors. And certainly don’t try to reach out to young people.

We dominated the over-65 group, he said. We should be happy with that.

He wasn’t being nasty. He was telling me to stick in P&I’s lane.

For about 10 minutes.

His safe, essentially narrow vision didn’t match that of P&I readers or authors, and certainly not that of founder John Menadue or Editor-in-Chief David Armstrong.

The P&I community is loyal, vigorous and vocal. I barely had my feet under the desk before the letters started arriving. So many were versions of the same message: “Welcome, but what can we do to get more people involved, especially younger readers and authors?”

That mattered. Our existing readers weren’t asking us to protect P&I as something just........

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