Rusbridger S


Reading


ince stepping down from his 20-year editorship of The Guardian, Alan Rusbridger has written a book, Breaking News: the Remaking of Journalism and


Why it Matters Now. Rusbridger’s Guardian was known for its focus on issues such as the environment as well as investigative scoops such as the Edward Snowden revelations, the phone hacking scandal and Wikileaks. He explains his motivation for writing the


book: “I did 20 years of editing, and then [I] took about a year to sort of recover and reflect, and then I thought, actually, what I really wanted to do was to describe that period in journalism, which saw a fantastically profound revolution.” He adds that people outside the industry have discussed the ‘digital revolution’ but no one has written about experiencing what it was like. Breaking News also deals with fake news. “It seems to me that journalism at its best is a pretty good toolkit for determining accuracy. It’s imperfect – but then everything is,” he says. In a perfect world, journalism would be the


answer to fake news, he says, with journalists having learnt the basics of things such as accuracy, fairness and multiple sources. “That’s what journalism should be, and it should be an answer to fake news. The problem we have today is that the machine for pumping out fake news is so enormous that it’s almost impossible for journalism to catch up. Well, it is impossible for journalism to catch up. “So I think what the world is struggling with


today is the sheer volume of material that’s being generated – not all of which is fake, some of it is really good – and how you apply the filter of journalism to try and distinguish between what’s true, what’s half true and what isn’t true.”


10 | theJournalist Lydia Wilkins talks


to the former Guardian editor about changes in journalism and their implications


Breaking News is not an autobiography.


Although there are personal anecdotes, it is more of a reflection on being at the centre of news, and the effects of going online. One point it makes is that going digital has


meant a quicker pace of news consumption, so it has the potential to make a newspaper more fallible. “There’s something about the unrelenting pace of news now. There’s a great pressure to be first, to be quick, and that’s partly because there’s a public appetite for it. If you’re not updating minute by minute, then you will lose a certain audience,” Rusbridger says. There should not be a tension between speed and accuracy in newsgathering, he adds, as news agencies are already in place to fill that role. A lot changed in journalism during Rusbridger’s


tenure, including the rise of the internet, an inquiry into press ethics and the largest stash of state secrets being leaked to a newspaper. However, Rusbridger does not think diversity in journalism is good enough, despite having improved in recent years.


“I think it is getting better in some places, but I think journalism was not alone in being quite late to work out what it should be doing. Gender, I think, is better. When I was at The Guardian we ended up with sort of 50-50 in the sort of senior


editorial team. Ethnicity, again is getting better in some places.” He thinks that journalism as an industry has


woken up to what it could be doing better. A 2017 report commissioned by the National Council for the Training of Journalists suggests that journalism students are more likely to be in work six months after graduation if they are white, do not have a disability and belong to a higher or middle socioeconomic group. It also suggests that journalism is less ethnically diverse than the UK workforce as a whole, with around 94 per cent of journalists being white. Our conversation turns to ethics. Under


Rusbridger’s editorship, Nick Davies broke the story of phone hacking at the News of the World, which led to police investigations as well as part one of the Leveson inquiry. Revelations are still playing out in court, as well as with whistleblower John Ford coming forward to reveal what he alleged took place at The Sunday Times. Ford also makes a brief appearance in Breaking News. Rusbridger says he does not know the substance of Ford’s allegations, but says the press makes great use of whistleblowers so they should be taken seriously and deserve to be heard. The book also touches upon newsroom


culture. At the time of the phone hacking trial, one conclusion of Byline Media chief executive Peter Jukes, as documented in his book Beyond Contempt, was that the environment in the News of the World’s newsroom might have encouraged the illegal activities. “I think there is a problem, which is not unique to the News of the World, which is that newsrooms can be very harsh places, and can be dominated by one or more people who can seem quite intimidating, and journalism as we know is not a great place to be looking for jobs at the moment.”


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