Media Matters
Alan Rusbridger is not a man willing to acknowledge his failings
Will Paul Dacre, recently replaced as editor of the Daily Mail, write his memoirs? I hope so. He met dozens of leading public figures in his 26 years at the helm.
I would urge him first to study Alan Rusbridger’s new book, Breaking News. It is part autobiography, part examination of the effect of the internet revolution on newspapers. This doorstopper by the former editor of the Guardian should serve as an exemplar of the genre. I don’t mean that in an entirely kindly way.
Like Dacre, Rusbridger is relatively unknown despite having wielded great power, in his case as helmsman of the influential newspaper of the liberal Left for 20 years. Both men are diffident and shy. Both are enormously talented journalists who dominated their newspapers, Dacre by unabashedly imposing his will, Rusbridger by operating more sinuously. In their different ways, they exercised far more power than editors normally command.
To describe Rusbridger as a visionary is no exaggeration. He intuited the revolutionary effect the internet would have on newspapers before almost anyone else in Britain. The Guardian, which had previously had a comparatively modest print circulation, became a leading online newspaper in this country, and prominent in the United States. It could do so because it was free. But, unlike many other such publications, it prospered online without dumbing down.
All this was a considerable achievement. The trouble was that an increasingly powerful Rusbridger was not just directing the journalistic fortunes of the Guardian but also its economic ones. The cost of expanding so quickly online was almost ruinous. Moreover, the strategy of being free cannibalised the print readership. One has only to compare the online experience of the Times (which charges) and the Guardian. A decade ago, the former was selling some 685,000 while the latter’s circulation was just under 400,000. The respective figures today are 425,000 and 136,000. Can there be any doubt that Rusbridger’s online strategy accelerated the demise of the printed paper?
Doubtless, he wouldn’t agree. But then, for such a clever man, he can be breathtakingly lacking in self-awareness. For example, he defends a decision, largely driven by him in 2005, to buy special presses for £80 million to print the Guardian in a so-called Berliner format – ie like Le Monde. This was an outlay the paper could ill afford when it could have adopted the slightly smaller tabloid shape at no cost. (Rusbridger loftily rubbishes the format while disregarding the fact that under his successor, Katharine Viner, the Guardian has got rid of its Berliner presses and gone tabloid.)
He also skates over the paper’s move to upmarket offices in King’s Cross in 2009, omitting to mention that cheaper but less glamorous headquarters in Lambeth were rejected.
In short, Rusbridger was a lousy businessman who was afforded excessive power as he pursued his journalistic dreams, and one suspects international notoriety, without counting the cost. Although he doesn’t tot up the figures, in his second ten years as editor the paper lost more than £300 million. It was largely because he had established a reputation for profligacy that colleagues including Katharine Viner – who merits only a few words in this weighty tome – scuppered Rusbridger’s ruse to become chairman of the Scott Trust, the body that controls the Guardian, after he had stepped down as editor in 2015.
This painful episode is not touched on, as most unpleasantnesses involving him are omitted from what is hardly a candid account. He doesn’t even mention his former colleague Roger Alton, one of the progenitors of the paper’s brilliant G2 section in the 1990s, and for ten years editor of the Observer, the Guardian’s sister paper. The two men finally fell out, and Alton went off to edit the Independent.
On the other hand, Rusbridger eulogises his old friend Nick Davies, who joined the Guardian on the same day in 1979. It was Davies who exposed phone hacking at the News of the World – and, by the by, outrageously accused Alton of virtually taking dictation from Tony Blair before the Iraq war in his book Flat Earth
News without offering a shred of proof. Davies is an indefatigable and forensic journalist but he is also consumed by a hatred of the tabloid press which Rusbridger largely shares. In his explosive story in 2011, which led to the Leveson Inquiry into press ethics and the closure of the News of the World, Davies wrongly accused the Sunday tabloid of deleting the voicemails of the missing schoolgirl Milly Dowler and giving her parents ‘false hope’. This significant error is breezily dismissed by Rusbridger in a footnote.
Towards the end of Breaking News, he invites us to join him as, glass of wine in hand, he reviews his career. What, if anything, does he regret? That he did not devote more coverage to climate change. That’s about it. Happy is the man who can look back on so many triumphs and so few mistakes.
‘Unpleasantnesses involving him are mostly omitted in a hardly candid account’