If you’re a Tribune fan (and we guess you must be since you’re reading this and if you’re not reading this then we suggest you go out and grab a copy now), there’s a good chance you’re on Twitter.

You may have picked up, shortly after our January issue hit the streets and the interwebz, a bit of noise over two articles in particular, by Justin and Ben.

We’re happy to generate controversy and discussion with this little magazine - our motto is “if you agree with everything you read, we’re doing something wrong”, however we have a few regrets about what transpired in the first weeks of January.

One is that many of the other excellent articles by our many excellent contributors didn’t receive the attention they deserved, overshadowed as they were by the melee.

As we’ve had cause to explain a few times lately over twitter and the odd email and some of the many blog posts we inspired, we’re learning. Neither of us have a media background, we just kind of fell into this after our one-page local wine bar gossip rag grew legs; there are a lot of things we’re doing that we’ve never done before and, we hope, that no one else has ever done before.

As we set out on the road to national distribution and charging people money for The Tribune, we scouted around for a few principles that would guide us and came back to Julian Morrow’s Andrew Olle Media Lecture in 2009. It was shortly after the shit-storm inspired by his program’s “Make A Realistic Wish” sketch, about dying children.

In the lecture he perfectly defined, for us, the three levels of “outrage” that satire or indeed any form of publication, electronic or otherwise, attract.

It could apply to any sketch or column or opinion or painting, but the best example is the Chaser sketch referred to above and the effect it has on the three groups of the Outraged.

First, there are the people genuinely and personally hurt by the sketch: in the Chaser’s case, people who had lost a child or knew someone who had.

Second, there are those offended by the piece, either out of consideration for the first group or simply due to their own moral/social/political compass.

Third, there are those who didn’t even see it but are whipped into outrage by talkback radio or any of the other hacks whose job or hobby it is to inspire outrage and moral panic.

The first group are the ones who should be considered when writing or creating something for public consumption and, should something get through that does indeed hurt (which is far, far different to simple offence), then those people deserve an apology, a retraction and the deepest regret.

Further, it must be accepted that the piece itself, or at least the part(s) of it that cause hurt, should not have been published in that form because the hurt it caused is more important than a joke. Morrow and The Chaser accepted this, along with their two-week sin-binning, as we did after the January issue was published.

The second group, those merely offended? While they may have some useful observations, offending people is not an offence. Morrow summed it up thus:

“But the inevitable corollary to freedom of speech is that there is no such thing as a general right to not be offended. So, to be honest, perhaps too honest, if you were just offended by that sketch I’m not really sorry. Of course, you have every right to be outraged and to express your offence to whoever you like. In many, but certainly not all, cases, I recognise that your outrage springs from a good place, from compassion for the suffering of the others I’ve just mentioned. But if you were just offended, unlike those who’ve been hurt, I don’t believe you’re owed an apology. You can demand one. And it’s possible that some people will say sorry to you - some for noble reasons, some for cowardly ones, some just to get you to shut up. But offence is a much lesser category of wrong, and I believe it should be responded to most cautiously in dealing with questions of taste and decency.”

The third group, the ones who were outraged because they were told to be outraged or just jumped on the outrage bandwagon, are the loudest and the most irrelevant. They are not the audience, they are not our concern.

We, like every other publisher and writer in the world, have a responsibility to our audience and vicariously to society at large. That responsibility is to not, accidentally or not, misuse our position in the media to hurt.

Where we have, to those we have, we apologise.

Now I shall take my hangover to bed.

Love to those who love us, a week reading the comments to those who don’t.

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