I’ve tried to make a difference: ex-editor

FORMER Western Daily Press and Gloucester Citizen editor Ian

Mean has been made an MBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours.

The award is for services to the community in Gloucestershire and he said: “I feel very honoured that this is the Queen’s special birthday honours list.”

His life mantra has been to try to make a difference, and it is a philosophy he still sticks to.

“I’m a person with strong views and opinions as an editor, and I was not always popular. But I like to think I was a critical friend and was always keen to be constructively critical where necessary.

“I tried to make a difference in journalism and I tried to do that through editing newspapers.

“I have a similar approach in the voluntary work that I do in terms of the health service with organ donation, and also with local community governance through Business West, where I’m the Gloucestershire director and GFirstLEP, where I’m a board member and now vice chair.”

Though officially retired, he remains very busy and feels there is still much work to do.

“I’m 75 and I still work every day,” he said.

Organ donation is an issue Ian is passionate about. He has chaired the Gloucestershire Hospitals Organ Donation committee for the last seven years. He also chairs ten organ donation committees between Gloucestershire and the Isle of Wight.

“We do have a lot of problems with various communities, particularly the Asian community, with organ donation,” he said. “We still need more people to come forward to sign up to the registrar.”

The work of Ian and his organ donation team here is paying dividends. Gloucestershire now has around 473,000 people on the organ donation register in Gloucestershire, one of the highest figures in the UK. As in anything he has done, Ian led from the front, and so it was with newspapers, something he remains inordinately proud of.

“The Citizen won newspaper of the year award twice,” he said.

“I remember the first time we won the citation said something like, ‘The Citizen, which punches way above its weight’.

Ian cites his involvement with the Gloucester Heritage Urban Regeneration Company as one of his proudest moments.

It transformed and remodelled the city, including the docks and the quays, at a time when it was desperately needed.