"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 (His relatively brief discussion of Donald Trump and the charges of Russian collusion have now seriously outdated by the John Durham investigation.)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.

When the Worldwide Web Was a Marvel - and a Mystery

If you can think back to a time before Amazon, before Google, before Facebook and Twitter and even before My Space, you might remember how the worldwide web was first breaking into the public collective consciousness. In Breaking News: The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters Now, former editor of The Guardian Alan Rusbridger describes how his newspaper encountered the early web and tried to understand what it meant – and how to make it work.  

This new thing had arrived on the communications landscape, and no one understood if it even mattered, or what you might do with it. At the exact same time Rusbridger was grappling with the question at The Guardian, we were grappling with it out our company. His efforts had one major advantage over ours – a small “skunk works” of IT people at the newspaper were working on the technical idea of the web for the newspaper. At our company, the IT organization had looked at the web idea and concluded that it was a passing fad, that the business’s future was more in the province of software programs like Lotus Notes. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.

Photograph by Umberto via Unsplash. Used with permission.

How Email Started a Revolution

I’ve been reading Breaking the News: The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters Now, the memoir published in 2018 by Alan Rusbridger. From 1995 to 2015, Rusbridger was editor of The Guardian, if not Britain’s largest newspaper, then perhaps its most influential. Part memoir, part newspaper history, the book is largely about how The Guardian recognized and then started coming to grips with the digital world. 

Part of what fascinated me about the book is that it covers approximately my own experience with the digital world and how I helped (or tried to help) a corporation’s communications department come to grips with it. My journey started slightly earlier that Rusbridger’s – in 1993. But it ended the same year his did, in 2015, and for the same reason, retirement. What he was doing with The Guardian and digital communications is almost a mirror image of what we were doing in corporation communications. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.

Top photograph by Online Printers via Unsplash. Used with permission.