#rusbridger

 The former editor-in-chief of the Guardian looks back on two decades that changed journalism for ever. By Alan Rusbridger.

By early 2017 the world had woken up to a problem that, with a mixture of impotence, incomprehension and dread, journalists had seen coming for some time. News, the thing that helped people understand their world, that oiled the wheels of society, that pollinated communities, that kept the powerful honest – news was broken.

The problem had many different names and diagnoses. Some thought we were drowning in too much news; others feared we were in danger of becoming newsless. Some believed we had too much free news; others, that paid-for news was leaving behind it a long caravan of ignorance.

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On this most people could agree: we were now up to our necks in a seething, ever churning ocean of information, some of it true, much of it wrong. There was too much false news, not enough reliable news. There might soon be entire communities without news, or without news they could trust.

Alan Rusbridger out as Guardian chairman

Alan Rusbridger, the veteran editor of The Guardian, will not become chairman of the paper’s ownership trust after being forced out by the new management. Latest financial news – CNNMoney.com

Alan Rusbridger on the phone-hacking scandal

The editor of the Guardian on a whirlwind week of arrests, political confessions and allegations of deleted emails involving News of the World, which closes on Sunday

DemocracyNow.org – To discuss the phone hacking scandal engulfing the Rupert Murdoch media empire…

The invitation to appear before the committee seemed to be part of an escalation in attacks on the Guardian since it began to publish stories on NSA documents, especially the NSA’s partnership with the UK spy agency, GCHQ.

Chairman of the Home Affairs Commitee, Keith Vaz, who is a Labour Party member, asked Rusbridger if he had been compelled to appear before the committee, since that had been suggested by various groups. Rusbridger was not aware that it was “optional.”

Vaz pushed Rusbridger to detail the location of all the files, which journalists had them and how many files each journalist possessed. Rusbridger did not find it sensible to answer this question but he did acknowledge that files were sent to the New York Times.

Pressed to address claims by the heads of security services, such as MI5′s Andrew Parker, that the files had caused a risk to national security, Rusbridger said the problem with these allegations is that they are vague and do not reference specific stories the organization has published. He notedmultiple officials: Norman Baker the Home Office minister, a member of the Senate intelligence committee who asked not to be named, a senior Obama administration official and a senior Whitehall official.” They had not accused The Guardian of causing any damage to national security.

The hearing suddenly seemed like a House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) hearing as Vaz actually asked Rusbridger if he loved his country.

Quoting Alan Rusbridger

Last year I managed to get a moment with Alan Rusbridger while I was working at Livity. He was visiting the offices to talk about youth engagement, I asked him a few general questions about Digital media and citizen journalism.

  Ayman: Lets start with the golden question - What would your advice be to a journalist who aspired to reach your kind of position, as a chief editor?

Alan: There used to be a ladder into journalism, where you would start at a local paper and work your way up. Now, with the rise of the internet and blogs, the openings are much greater. Anyone can upload or publish anything, so now it is all about practising. Writing is a skill which you have to keep practising. I mean it doesn’t have to be writing, it could be video or audio work, but whatever media skill it is, it is key to keep practising. Sooner or later, when you get good, people will begin to take notice and you will gain exposure and people will begin to read what you are writing.

So given that there is a movement in media towards ‘citizen journalism’ do you think that content is going to lose its accuracy?

It shouldn’t do. There are general rules in journalism which people generally stick to, getting facts right and making things clear, and of course using trusted sources. I don’t think there is anything about being a citizen journalist which makes your reporting more unreliable.

A problem with digital journalism is that it is all about the amount of clicks and visitor numbers a site receives. Do you think this digitization is a problem in the sense that people possibly get less engaged?

Increasingly advertisers are getting more interested in engagement as well as clicks. Clicks are still interesting to us because we find out the amount of people finding our pages, but the new technologies we have to measure engagement are what advertisers are finding more interesting.

Where do you think the future of journalism lies then. Is it the internet?

There is no question that digital publishing is the media revolution. Take it back 20 years, the people who had access to the media were the people who owned it. Now, however, everyone has access to the media and anyone can be journalist. I think this is a big change in journalism in general, and it is where journalism seems to be going at the moment with citizen journalists and blogs.

The Guardian used to be a big national paper, but now it has evolved into an international publication and platform. Where do you see The Guardian now?

I think it has several different identities. It is a newspaper, which I hope will go on for a long time. There is a website, and applications across all the major phones including Android and BlackBerry. It is also now much less about us telling you what to believe, but more about us presenting the case and the reader making his mind up. This is a fundamental change in journalism across the board as media outlets are trying to do this more often.

‘The Guardian has doggedly pursued the phone-hacking scandal until recently it had been a lonely figure on reporting it” That’s a quotation from you. Why do you think the rest of the media were so reluctant to catch on to this story?

Well, it’s sometimes things like newspapers following a stupid rule like, ‘that’s not our story, it’s your story’. What the general media failed to see was that this was deeper than just any media story, it was about British public life and how the whole media is perceived. For example questions such as why did the police not do anything? Why did the regulators not do anything? It was more than just any media story, but an insight into the place of media in society.

Thanks for your time Alan!