We need to talk about print journalism

Readers will find a moment of pain early on in former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger’s memoir, Breaking News. It’s a terrible what-could-have-been.

In 1999, the Guardian, Britain’s best newspaper, set up talkboards on its website where readers could chat online. It started with football, but readers talked about anything on conversation threads they set up, with moderators occasionally pleading with people to stay on topic.

I remember them because peculiar people interest me. Anonymity makes people stretch the boundaries of strange. One passionate thread, “What I ate today,” was eccentric to the point of unhingement and thus riveting, with total strangers arguing over custardy snacks and wieners at dusk. The talk drizzled and flowed.

Basically, it was a version of Facebook, which launched in 2004. So the Guardian had had five years to ask, “How do we monetize talkboards?” It did not. It left the answer to Mark Zuckerberg, but I offer this thought: imagine if Facebook had been built by the Guardian, where 19th-century editor C.P. Scott’s “Comment is free, but facts are sacred” are words to live by.

It’s not just the missing $612 billion that sours, it’s that the Guardian’s values would have created a beacon, not the Satan’s plaything Facebook became.

I doubt Rusbridger would like the earnest dullness of Canadian newspapers, but it is our nature. He writes that newspapers have to know their brand and voice, and must maintain their uniqueness. He casually drops great ideas like birdseed on a trail, e.g. “Should we make [readers] pay to comment?” (Canadian editors perk up. Yes!)

Best not to linger on what might have been. Rusbridger, famous for backing long dogged investigations and for his inexplicable Potter-like hair, began his career in 1977 at a small local paper and ended up overseeing 20 years of stunningly good journalism while the industry grew thinner and the money went elsewhere.

Many industries are seeing this, in particular, book publishing and music (Spotify is the Facebook of sound), but those are structures based on the work of individual writers and musicians. The Guardian, founded in 1821, is something of a public enterprise, with high intellectual standards, a belief in social responsibility, and imaginative coverage of “the way we live now,” all offered with sprezzatura, the talent for making difficult things look easy.

Rusbridger tried to do good and be good — Snowden, early WikiLeaks, Murdoch phone hacking — producing journalism that checked and balanced corporate and government power. That’s hard to achieve with vanishing advertisers and increasingly underpopulated newsrooms.

The Guardian relies on its in-house backer, the Scott Trust, just as the Washington Post relies on Jeff Bezos, and the New York Times relies on the belief that it would be absurd for New York City not to have a central news site, duh. The monster Paul Dacre, ex-editor of the vicious and fascinating Daily Mail, calls this the “subsidariat,” journalists relying on the generosity of big money. But, as current editor Katharine Viner would say, minor money works too. The Guardian, with influence far beyond its readership, is set to break even next year thanks to reader donations and voluntary subscriptions.

Rusbridger’s Breaking News (with a painfully obvious subtitle, The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters Now, that I assume his publisher insisted on) is a history of modern print journalism.

His job was terrifying long before Donald Trump began the “fake news” onslaught so beloved of damaged American voters. But news, handled well, is always facing a force majeure of the powerful. Rusbridger faced libel suits and won, despite the promised vengeance of Murdoch editor Rebekah Brooks, who swore the hacking story would end “with Alan Rusbridger on his knees, begging for mercy.” I imagine she regrets the remark.

Anything can happen, and it did, and it will, is basically Rusbridger’s message. He concludes by praising reporters, “the bees of the world’s information systems” in a world run by “hyperglobal corporations, the untaxed, rootless entities that know more about us than our own mothers.”

(Rusbridger will be interviewed by Toronto Star editor Irene Gentle at a Canadian Journalism Foundation event in Toronto on Nov. 29 at the Isabel Bader Theatre. Breaking News will be published in Canada Nov. 27.)