So Rusbridger (the same one whom Murdoch accused of talking “B.S.”) is firing back at both titles—but privately—in memo emailed to staff. In it, he variously accuses them of envy, of having divided staff, of not believing in the web and of sharing the same insecurity and rates of decline as everyone.

And the animosity isn’t over. The Guardian has taken out a series of ads suggesting a Lebedev-owned Independent’s freedom is restricted. That’s the same Lebedev who cares deeply enough about an independent free press that he’s formed a philanthropic fund to finance investigative reporting in both Russia and Britain.

Here is the memo:

One of the unique things about our business is that the people who write about our company (in print, at least) are also our competitors.  It shouldn’t matter, but you know it does. And, yes, they say the same about our reporting of them.

Carolyn (McCall)‘s decision to move on has been the cue for some pretty tendentious reporting during the course of the past week.It’s useful to have a little industry context in mind when you read some of it.

The Times managed to report with a straight face that Carolyn was leaving a company “in turmoil.” This is the paper which, together with The Sunday Times, has just declared losses of more than £87m; which has scrapped its G2 equivalent; slashed its news run and has a staff deeply divided over (Rupert) Murdoch’s gamble on pay walls. The Times’s print circulation is falling at exactly the same rate as the Guardian’s—but the Times’s web traffic is down seven percent year on year while the Guardian’s rose by 22 percent.

That doesn’t make it a paper “in turmoil.” But it does give you a realistic measure by which to judge how newspapers in our market are performing in the face of recession and digital disruption.

The Independent—in the week in which the owners had to pay an ex-KGB Russian oligarch £9m to take it off their hands – showed a similar lack of self-awareness. The paper that started the “format wars” with the expectation of catapulting over its rivals now sells just 90,000 copies a day at full price… and has never made any secret about not really believing in the internet.

Having performed worst in the “format war,” The Independent repeatedly questions the Guardian’s switch to Berliner – which has seen us grow our share of the paid-for print market. It loves to make the case that we have lavished too much money on digital (net cost since 2002 little more than £2m a year).  Having vociferously argued (in 2006) that newspapers were dangerously under-priced and that the future was about boosting cover price rather than hoping for increased advertising revenues, it is now talking about going free.

The Indie has struggled on pretty amazingly over the years – in the face of precisely the same forces bearing down on us all. Can that pot recognize a kettle when it sees one?

There will be more of this ahead. Let’s be honest. Some of it is envy: the Scott Trust has been, and continues to be, a remarkable illustration of how a company can support serious journalism and how a news organization can place editorial at the heart of everything it does. So it comes under attack – just like the BBC – by people who dislike or envy the subsidy model and our journalistic freedoms. Reporters on other papers telephone to question why we invest so much in our journalism and why the editor of the Guardian has—always—had a seat round the table when decisions are taken about commercial, as well as editorial, strategies. As if these were bad things.

Some of it is because we have differentiated ourselves with a clear strategy of not closing off our journalism by a universal paywall. Murdoch’s gamble is just that – a gamble. Most non-print commentary is highly sceptical that it can work, but we can certainly watch and learn. Murdoch himself is quietly backing all options by leaving many of his businesses outside paywalls (Sky News website, Bookarmy and numerous others around his empire). We – along with others (including non-print players)—can equally certainly make the most of the opportunity presented to us. It’s no more than Mr. Murdoch would do to us.

Some of it is simply because this is the age of editorial insecurity. All journalists are self-evidently extremely anxious to discover the economic model which will be certain to sustain what we do and believe in. No one in the world has that yet – not us, not Murdoch, not Arthur Sulzberger, not the Frankfurter Allgemeine or Le Monde. Insecurity often breeds anger, denial and a search for someone to blame. We are all doing the best to find the right model for what we do. It’s probable that there isn’t going to be a universally “right” framework for everyone in future (eg advertising + circulation revenue = success).  What’s right for Murdoch (with Sky as a digital subscription model in the background and infinitely deep corporate cross-subsidies) may well not work for us at GNM, and vice versa. There may be different models within one newspaper. We’ll all make some mistakes along the way.  We can all learn from each other.

But we must have an internal conviction about what feels right for us and stick to it. Clay Shirky last week called it an organisation’s “self-conception.”  It is for us to decide what our journalism will look like in future; to what extent we want it to be open to the world and to what extent we want to collaborate with others in forging it. If we can internalise this conviction – and not be distracted by the pecking and sniping of outsiders who may not believe in, agree with, know about or even understand our strategy – then we have a better chance of succeeding. That discussion is currently taking place: it has already involved well over 200 of you across all departments, commercial, technological and editorial. Those conversations are some of the best I—and others—have ever experienced at the Guardian. It feels as if we are energised and galvanised by the possibilities we can mutually imagine.

We’re doing all this in order to preserve and nurture the remarkable things we are doing journalistically. Since moving to Kings Place, we have investigated tax avoidance, torture, phone-hacking, policing, Trafigura, sports funding and much else. We have led the debate on economics, civil liberties, ethical citizenship, culture, climate change, social welfare, penal policy, constitutional reform and much else.

The Observer has relaunched in a much-admired new form. It is a serious, thoughtful paper, which is doing exactly what a Sunday paper should do – distill, contextualise and broaden understanding. The Review section combines great elegance of writing with confidence of design.  The website is powering away, re-inventing how reporting is done, how audiences are engaged with and how to achieve the greatest richness and diversity from involving others in what we do. We are streets ahead of others in the way we distribute our content and in the way we are experimenting with data.

We have – without most readers noticing – achieved significant and necessary savings. We’ve managed the sort of integration, convergence and physical moves that have convulsed other news organisations – and done it with great calm and common sense. The editorial, web development and commercial sides of the business are united in the strategy for print and digital going forward. We talk all the time. On paywalls there is no difference between the editorial vision and the commercial imperative.  From GMG chief executive and financial director, to GNM managing director to advertising director to editor we all believe pretty much the same.

In GMG, we have a parent company whose financial strategy has underwritten our success and will continue to provide us with support and security for the foreseeable future. Carolyn has been the most supportive chief executive any editor could want, in matters legal, financial and editorial. A chief executive who fights for editorial is, in my book, a Good Thing. You’d be surprised by the calls from outside journalists—yes, journalists—who want to portray this as a Bad Thing.

Outsiders look at all this and they don’t quite understand it. They prod it looking for rifts and splits and divisions.

No one’s pretending there can be no tensions in an industry as fundamentally disrupted and challenged as ours. It would be a strange, and unhealthy, business which didn’t argue and examine and test all alternatives, occasionally change its mind and be constantly open to challenge and change. So, yes, there’s robust discussion. We are additionally challenged in all our thinking by a sharp set of non-executive directors on GMG, including Brent Hoberman ( ex Last Minute), Neil Berkett (Virgin Media) and Amelia Fawcett (ex Morgan Stanley).  So no proposition gets a free ride in this company.  Equally, there is a very high level of agreement about what we’re doing and how we’re doing it.

Of all media companies I truly believe we are better placed than the great majority to make the transformative change that will be demanded of us.  The editorial future has the potential to be richer than anything any previous generation of journalists could have imagined.  We can imagine it - and we are well on the way to achieving it.

Alan