BREAKING NEWS
THE REMAKING OF JOURNALISM AND WHY IT MATTERS
ALAN RUSBRIDGER Canongate, 442pp, £20, Oldie price £13.91 inc p&p
Alan Rusbridger was probably the best and most successful British newspaper editor of his time, Robert Kaiser said in the FT, and some of the best reading in this ‘engaging memoir’ is found in his accounts of the
Guardian’s greatest triumphs under his editorship, among them the exposé of phone hacking by the News
of the World and its publication of the secrets revealed by Edward Snowden, for which it shared a Pulitzer Prize with the Washington Post.
As Rusbridger was the first editor to recognise, print journalism is under attack from social media. Peter Wilby wrote in the New Statesman: ‘Rusbridger likens the continual innovations of the software companies to the work of the death watch beetle: invisible until the house collapses. “We were at the mercy of whatever would come next from a handful of tech giants 5,000 miles away.”’
Rusbridger was an adventurer in this strange new world but his
instincts were to plunge ahead, said Kaiser. ‘He succeeded in making the
Guardian a truly global product… the leading serious English-language website in the world. Rusbridger decided America could be the
Guardian’s salvation, and added hundreds of staff to create a US online edition that covered politics there extensively. In 2014, when Rusbridger announced he was stepping down as editor, the
Guardian wasn’t profitable. It lost £58.6 million in 2015, more than it could afford; even greater losses continued the next year. Suddenly, Rusbridger’s legacy looked anything but rosy. In the US [in June 2018] it had 35 million “unique visitors”. The New York Times had 87 million; the Washington Post 81 million.’