"Breaking News" by Alan Rusbridger

Alan Rusbridger was editor of The Guardian from 1995 until he retired in 2015. His career spanned the years of the advent of the worldwide web as a significant force, the rise of blogging, the explosion of social media, and the smart phone turning everyone into a journalist. Aside from technology (a big aside), the same period saw a fundamental change in how reporters and editors covered the news; objectivity and balance were out, and “contextualizing” and “perspective” were in.  

The author doesn’t describe it this way in his memoir Breaking News: The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters Now, but the press has returned to a kind of 19^th century model of partisan reporting and quasi-sensationalism. The book was published in 2018, and it still reads like an up-to-date account of journalism in general and British journalism in particular. (His relatively brief discussion of Donald Trump and the charges of Russian collusion have now seriously outdated by the John Durham investigation.)

 

But Rusbridger and The Guardian realized something in the middle of all the technological change in communications – if The Guardian would survive, it had to look far beyond the shores of Britain and especially to the United States.

 

In a highly readable account, we learn how The Guardian grappled with the worldwide web, how Facebook and other social media were major gamechangers, and how audiences were increasingly global. He also notes what was most likely the most significant change of all – Craig’s List, which singlehandedly trashed the newspaper business model that had been in place for more than a century. When Craig’s List began appearing in different cities and offering classified ads for free, the major source of revenue for newspapers disappeared, and disappeared fast. 

 

Alan Rusbridger

He led the newspaper not only through technology change but also through some of the biggest stories of the last 25 years: 9/11, the Iraqi and Afghanistan wars, Edward Snowden’s leaks (for which The Guardian won a Pulitzer Prize), Wikileaks, parliamentary scandals, the journalism phone-hacking scandal in the UK, and more. These are fascinating stories of how a major newspaper worked behind the scenes to cover these major events. 

 

Rusbridger read English at Cambridge University and then became a journalist. He worked for several local papers, The Guardian, the Observer, and the Washington Bureau of the London Daily News, before returning to The Guardianas editor of the Weekend Magazine, deputy editor, and finally editor. He’s now editor of Prospect Magazine, a UK political monthly. He’s also the author of Play It Again, a memoir of journalism and music, and News and How to Use It. He’s received a considerable number of awards, recognitions, and honorary degrees. He lives with his family in London.

 

Breaking News is the story of a journalist who sat atop a major newspaper for two decades, how news decisions were made, and how the changes engulfing the industry were met (not everything was successful). It’s an account of how journalism was transitioning at frightening speed from the traditional news model to something else, which has yet to emerge and be defined.

Playground on the levee

We were children, running

upward through foot-high grass,

playing chase and you’re it

and sometimes when we were

ambitious an angled Red Rover.

It was an elongated hill,

designed, we believed, 

for our entertainment because

it had always been there,

in our lifetimes. None of us

asked why.

Slightly older, we could see

the water on one side was

higher than the streets and 

the houses on the other.

We’d watch ships pass, and

look behind us to see cars

and buses pass. 

Older still, I walked to the top

one spring, to see how close

the river and its rising waves

were to the top: a few feet,

a closeness I’d never seen,

at a speed I’d never seen, 

as if the river had determined

to widen itself 

like a woman’s fan

opening at the opera.

I couldn’t find the playground.

The editors of Tweetspeak Poetry are hosting a 30-Day, 30-Poem Challenge for Earth Month entitled, appropriately enough, Poetic Earth Month. Today, the featured poem is “Immolation” by Anne Doe Overstreet. The poetry prompt is to write a poem that attempts to either harness or challenge natural forces.

Photograph by Justin Wilkens via Unsplash. Used with permission.

The Origin of a Monster: Happy Birthday, Frankenstein!

I was seven years old when a late Saturday night television program called “House of Shock” began broadcasting in New Orleans. It was hosted by a character named Morgus the Magnificent, a mad scientist aided by his two assistants, Chopsley (tall, hooded, and never speaking) and Eric, the talking skull. Morgus showed old horror and science fiction movies in between clips of his crazy experiments, and – to a seven-year-old and his older brother – he was just as entertaining as the movies.

One of those movies was the 1931 version of Frankenstein, starring Boris Karloff at the monster. That movie framed the Frankenstein legend in my head for more than 50 years. This year, I saw that it was the novel’s 200^thbirthday (officially on Jan. 1), and I decided to read the original Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley.

I was in for a shock.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Illustration: Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, the author of Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus.

Poets and Poems: Sinead Morrissey and “On Balance”

I’m reading On Balance, the newest collection by poet Sinead Morrissey, and, for some odd reason, I keep being reminded of Brooklyn Bridge. It’s not that Morrissey’s collection is influenced by other poets who wrote about the bridge – Hart Crane, Jack Kerouac, and Marianne Moore, among them. It’s more that the poem of this collection grapple with technology, the wonders technology brings, and the tradeoffs that technology always demands. I’m reminded, too, of the French Impressionist painters like Renoir who painted pastoral scenes with railway bridges and trains in the background (or foreground).

Morrissey lives in Belfast. Possibly the most famous ship ever constructed in the famous shipyards there was the Titanic, so it’s not a surprise to find the first poem (and the first about technology) in On Balance to be about the doomed ship. Specifically, “The Millihelen” focuses on the moment the ship travels down the slipway into the water. It represents a marvelous feat of human engineering, and one that will eventually cost the lives of more than 1,500 people. Technology has its price.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

What a teacher knows

The education courses

and seminars and programs

at conventions can’t teach

the teachers the one critical

skill she needs: how to calm

and control 20 seventh-graders

while she simultaneously

tries to fix the only resistant

technology in the classroom:

the video player.

Photograph by Petr Kratochvil via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Taking a bite of the Apple (again)

This article is a first. The first written on our new computer. And the first I’ve ever written on an Apple system.

Our very first home computer – way back in 1988 – was an Apple II GS, supposedly ideal for our then-7-year-old. About three months after we bought it, Apple announced it was abandoning the Apple II and pursuing the Macintosh.

It was a good introduction to the tech world. As companies go on to pursue new products, they tend to abandon the products (and the customers) who made them successful in the first place.

Our next home computer was not an Apple product. It was Microsoft DOS-based. If I recall correctly, it was an HP. For more than 20 years after that, we stayed DOS-based, as did 90 percent of the rest of world. My company used DOS-based computers as well; every employer I’ve had since the advent of computers has used DOS-based systems.

Then came the iPad. I was one of three guinea pigs at work given one to try out. Other departments started buying them, over the objections of the IT department. Finally, IT capitulated and accepted the inevitable. People liked iPads. They were much easier to carry around than laptops. And more visual.

The next hurdle to fall was the Blackberry mobile phone. For years, we could have any phone we wanted, as long as it was a Blackberry. The civil disobedience that was the iPad in the office became the civil disobedience of the iPhone. My last phone before I retired was an iPhone. The phone I bought for post-retirement was an iPhone.

Then the time arrived for a new home computer. Actually, it arrived a couple of years ago, but we extended the life of our old Dell by getting it fixed and adding some capacity and speed. But the time had finally arrived, and our 8-year-old Dell needed to retire.

Based on our experience with the iPad and the iPhone, we decided to try Apple. Our new iMac All-in-One came home Monday (that’s a photo of it at the right).

I had talked with people who had owned both Macs and DOS-based computers, and they said the biggest difference was the commands. Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V don’t work on the Mac. I have used those two commands a lot. As in thousands of times. As in they are imprinted on my brain. It took me a while, by I finally figured out out to do it on the Mac. As in, I figured it out by accident. As in, I accidentally pushed the cursor to the top of the screen. I found the big stuff hidden up there. Like File, Edit, View, Format and Tools. It was a major discovery.

My second major discovery: how to save documents. The technicians at the store where we bought the computer saved all of our old Dell computer documents into a folder on the Mac desktop. And they saved it all – music, photographs, Word documents, Excel documents, PowerPoint presentations, email. Transferring the documents from that folder to the Mac applications should be simple. Except it’s slightly more complicated than a simple drag and drop. You also have to save it within the application (I used the “save as” process). And it doesn’t save by your old folders. I think what happens is that you drag the folder, like a group of Word documents, to Word on the Mac, and the Mac empties the folder so you can save it as a folder or album again.

Minimizing pages is also different. It’s fairly straightforward, but I drove myself crazy trying to do it from an expanded screen (the button to minimize goes away when you have an expanded page, and I had to jerry-rig the page to find it again). But I’ve now learned how to keep those pages open.

I did get the new printer operating almost immediately. Getting the Mac through set-up was also easy. But operating the Mac is not the same as operating a DOS-based system, especially when you have 20+ years of experience with DOS-based systems.

There are tutorials, and I did look at one for Word on the iMac. It looks like one of the PowerPoint slides that try to cram 50,000 ideas into one slide.

One big advantage is having the time to learn the iMac. Trial and error is actually a good way to learn. Trying to figure it out is also a good way. And I have the old Dell set up in another room as a backup.

Slowly, I’m getting there. We’ll see if this new bite of the Apple will take.

So far, the verdict is that it will. 

Top photograph by Petr Kratochvil via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.