Hugo Young Chairman, The Scott Trust

The Scott Trust is an unusual owner of a substantial British business. Its assets combine two somewhat different cultures. The majority of them are run like other commercial operations, which means being intensely conscious of efficiency and profit in the service of highly competitive markets. Trader Media, which we helped to build from almost nothing, along with our regional newspapers and our expanding radio interests, would not flourish if they weren't a commercial match for some very potent rivals.

The Guardian and the Observer are also run commercially. Their brief is to be profit seeking, and their commercial departments, like their editorial teams, are respected across the newspaper industry. But the uniqueness of the Trust gives all its newspapers, especially the national titles, a big advantage. The proprietor plays no part in the editorial content of any of them, and is the guarantor, thanks to the Trust structure, against unwanted takeover by predators.

When the Trust was formed, in 1936, the purpose of its founders was to preserve the Manchester Guardian. The immediate threat to the great paper came from death duties, but the solution endures into modern times as protection against the worst effects of belonging to a quoted company. The paper had acquired a world reputation under its celebrated owner-editor, C P Scott, and might have foundered but for the far-sighted generosity of his descendants. When they handed it over to the Trust, it was with only one instruction, that the business and newspapers should be "carried on as nearly as may be upon the same principles as they have heretofore been conducted".

When the business was small, this was not a hard rule to follow. For several decades, there was the Guardian, the Manchester Evening News and a few satellite papers round Manchester. But under the hand of some gifted managers, the business base grew substantially, into one that, in the current year, turned over £439.9m. This involves larger choices and bigger risks, but has not altered the essential ethos that seeks to combine moral purpose, which places the Guardian at the pinnacle of GMG's business objectives, with hardheaded commercial operation.

The Trust does not manage the business. A trustee from an earlier period once said: "It is largely passive, as long as everything is going right". But when the business is as big as this one has become, the sole shareholder has an important strategic responsibility. It is less than a Prime Minister, overseeing every decision, but more than a monarch, confined to listening and warning. It meets regularly to hear management account for progress in each division. It is the forum of final approval for the GMG budget. If it doesn't like an investment avenue the management is exploring, it can say so. The limits of "as heretofore", though necessarily flexible in an age when much has happened that was unimaginable in 1936, remain in trustees' minds. Every business in the Group needs resources, and in the division of what looks like the most prudent allocation, the Trust has a vital part to play.

This is eased by its membership, a mix of company managers and employees, together with a cohort of outsiders, including two descendants of C P Scott. What binds trustees together is a passionate belief in the purpose of the Guardian and the Observer, and the other newspapers the Trust owns. It remains at heart a newspaper Trust. But we are also stewards of an idea of ownership that reaches right through the company. This idea is to own a successful business, run on decent principles, governed by long-term goals that other media businesses, facing irresistible short-term pressures, are finding it harder to stick to. As the internet accelerates, collapsing plans and prophecies at the speed of light, the old Trust, we think, is oddly well placed to handle the new challenges.

Hugo Young* (Chairman)
Aged 62. Member and Chairman of the Trust since 1989. Joined the Guardian as a political columnist in 1984, from the Sunday Times where he had been Deputy Editor.

Malcolm Dean
Aged 62. Joined the Trust in 1994. He has served on the Guardian for over 30 years working as a roving reporter, social policy leader-writer and section editor. Society, the paper's social policy supplement, began as a column under his name. He later went on to launch it as a separate section covering the entire social policy spectrum.

Anne Lapping
Aged 60. Joined the Trust in 1994. She is a Director of Brook Lapping Productions Limited and a Non-Executive on an NHS Trust. She was formerly on the board of Channel Four Television Company Limited and a writer on the Economist.

Paul Myners
Aged 52. Joined the Trust and Group in March 2000. He is also Chairman of Gartmore Investment Management plc and Deputy Chairman of PowerGen plc. Previously held directorships include Celltech Group plc, National Westminster Bank plc, Orange plc and N.M. Rothschild & Sons Limited.

Andrew Phillips (Lord Phillips of Sudbury)
Aged 62. Joined the Trust in 1991. Founder partner of solicitors Bates, Wells & Braithwaite; Non-Executive Director of Faraday Underwriting Limited and Gough Hotels Limited; President of the Citizenship Foundation and Solicitors Pro Bono Group; Trustee of other charities. Regular broadcaster. Life Peer.

Robert Phillis
Aged 55. Joined the Trust and Company in December 1997 from the BBC where he was Deputy Director-General. He was previously Chief Executive of ITN, Group Managing Director of Carlton Communications plc and Managing Director of Central Independent Television plc.

Peter Preston
Aged 63. Joined the Trust in 1979. He was Editor of the Guardian from 1975 to 1995 and afterwards became Editor in Chief of the Guardian and the Observer, before retiring in 1998. He is a Co-Director of the Guardian Foundation, Chairman of the British Executive of the International Press Institute and a Governor of the British Association for Central and Eastern Europe.

Alan Rusbridger
Aged 47. Joined the Trust in 1997 and the Board in 1999. Joined the Guardian as a reporter in 1979, became Deputy Editor in 1993, appointed to Guardian Newspapers Board in 1994 and became Editor in 1995. He is Executive Editor of the Observer.

Jonathan Scott
Aged 53. Joined the Trust in 1988. He is currently a Director of KPMG Corporate Finance where he has been for 3 years and he was previously a Director of SBC Warburg.

Martin Scott
Aged 59. Joined the Trust in 1988. He worked for the company in Manchester from 1965 to 1978. He is Client Director at Ashridge College.

* As Chairman of the Trustees, Hugo Young attends all meetings of the Guardian Media Group plc Board, ex officio, and also chairs the Remuneration Committee of the Board.