i Editor's Letter: Celebrating our 1000th issue

How should you celebrate your 1,000th? The Politburo of the Communist Party of Vietnam, marking the millennial anniversary of Hanoi four years ago, chose to build a park, a museum, two bridges and a motorway – and to bury 1,000 selected objects with a message for future generations, to be opened in 1,000 years.

We had a whip-round in the office but it wasn’t quite enough to commission a twice-life-size statue of i’s first editor, Stef, for the atrium, so we turned to you.

About 500 readers have written to me by email or on Twitter to mark today’s paper, the 1,000th edition of i. The praise is heart-warming and the criticism constructive. We publish a selection of your contributions here. I’m only sorry that we cannot print them all – they would have come to about 20,000 words – but the variety there represents many of the points that others have made. The long, unedited version was circulated around our HQ yesterday – read with intrigue by hundreds of people here, from the apprentices to senior management.

Our youngest correspondent today is Ben Wardle, 14, an i subscriber from Cheshire, but the youngest reader I know of is in fact Javier Lamond Marino, eight, who reads news articles aloud five times a week. He especially enjoyed the recent report on the closure of Mary Portas’s knicker factory.

i, the first new national paper in almost 25 years, has grown because of your support. Many thanks are due: to staff and management here, to Evgeny Lebedev for his belief and investment, but most of all to you, the readers. You have been quick to tell us what you think. Please stay that way.

i@independent.co.uk

Twitter.com: @olyduff