Beleaguered BA chief executive Willie Walsh was described as “a man of honour” when he passed up a £700,000 bonus after delivering the airline’s best figures for a decade.

But after the Terminal 5 fiasco comes the inexorable rise in oil prices, which will ensure that the cost of filling up his aircraft in 2008 will for the first time overtake the cost of staffing. And now his pilots have gone to court to enforce a right to go on strike.

It’s certainly a bumpy ride at BA and the boss must have been heartened at coverage of the way the crew reacted to avert a real disaster when their stricken Boeing 777 crash-landed at Heathrow in January.

But if you’re Willie Walsh it seems there’s always something else to bite you on the behind. He has now received a personal letter from his counterpart at betting group Ladbroke, Chris Bell, informing him that he has instructed his 14,000 staff not to fly BA. And all because check-in staff at Barbados tried to bump his 14-year-old daughter and her friend off the flight home.

Your corporate reputation is only as good as your people.

As trainee journalists we were often rapped over the knuckles for stating “the bleedin’ obvious”.

“Don’t you think your story might be a little more interesting if you tell the readers something they don’t know?” the sub would sneer.

So the World Editors Forum reveals the earth-shattering news that more than eight out of ten editors believe that there will be fully integrated news rooms in the near future, contributing content for all media.

More significant perhaps is that only 45 per cent think that the quality of journalism will improve with 27 per cent of the opinion that it will decline.

Is there a connection between this and the finding that two thirds of respondents, representing editors-in-chief and senior news executives, believe that the importance of opinion and analysis pages will increase?

Is that because this form of content lacks the rigour of newsgathering and will be cheaper to produce?

Who will provide the news on which this opinion and analysis is based? Will editors-in-chief and news executives employ reporters – and sub-editors – with the traditional newsgathering skills and a desire to get things right, down to the last errant apostrophe? I hope so.