News stories always have an impact – but the reach of that influence can be impossible to predict

Journalists write stories for a variety of reasons, but no one wants to see their work ignored.

That might mean seeing other news organisations race to jump on your story, as we saw with Clémence Michallon’s extraordinary Liam Neeson interview earlier this year. It might mean simply gaining millions of readers.

Some subjects thrust reporters firmly into conflict with certain groups. If you cover the dreary antics of “Tommy Robinson”, there is often a fiery response from his supporters, whether online or in our email inboxes. I’ve been surprised in the past by the deluge of righteous fury from the “vaping community” if a story dares to ponder how regulated the fake fags should be.

Financial reporters love getting scoops that move the markets. There’s a strange pleasure in a spike on a chart that can be traced back to the moment your story went live.

A lot of this response happens in the public domain, but readers rarely get to see other kinds of impact. It might come from the subject of a story themselves. If you publish a piece which rattles cages, you can expect to spend some time dealing with the aftermath.

And then there are the grander, more tangible moments. Stories where you can almost touch the impact.

We’re proud of our Final Say campaign and the reporting that has underpinned it. It has driven a million and more of you to sign our petition calling for a new referendum on the Brexit deal and helped put the issue front and centre of the debate. Before we started, it was considered the longest of long shots.

And this week, we had some good news from our columnist James Moore. He has used his regular columns to highlight the poor treatment of disabled people on London’s transport system. On Thursday he wrote about a rare win.

The Greater London Authority unanimously passed a motion that has been sent to London mayor Sadiq Khan calling on him to ensure staff on London’s transport network are trained to respect the wishes (and privacy) of disabled passengers.

It followed a piece he wrote about a humiliating experience on the Tube. And if that fate awaits fewer people as a result, then that’s some impact we can write home about.

Yours

Joel Dimmock

Voices deputy editor