ABSTRACT
Commitment to social work is, indeed, the wellspring of the professional press, but that is not the same as the reader being led to expect exculpation for every decision, or a defence of indefensible action. If Social Work Today had absorbed the magazines of the organizations which were to amalgamate to create British Association of Social Workers (BASW), that magazine's increasing rivalry with Community Care tolled the knell for other magazines. In June 1988 it was purchased by Reed Business Publishing as an independent sister paper to Community Care. The primary function of a professional magazine is to reflect the facts and changes of the world which its readers inhabit, to try to be, as the playwright Arthur Miller said of a good newspaper, 'a nation talking to itself'. With the publication of the White Paper, Caring for People, there was, inter alia, a special twelve-page pullout supplement.
