After 20 years as editor, Alan Rusbridger is stepping down. Here he reflects on two decades of sweeping change – from broadsheet to Berliner, Aitken to Snowden, and newsprint to pixels – and recalls his fervent wish when he took the job: “Please, please let me not drop the vase”
his, if you’re reading the physical paper – which, of course, you are not – is my last edition as editor. In just over 20 years we have put nearly 7,500 papers “to bed”, as almost no one says nowadays. At some point in the 24-hour, seamlessly rolling digital news cycle, you’ll have a new editor. I will have slipped away and my successor, Katharine Viner, will have materialised at the helm.
Since 1821 there have been just 10 editors of the Guardian – or 11 if you count Russell Scott Taylor, the 18-year-old who helped edit for a brief period in the 1840s. The greatest of them, CP Scott, managed 57 years in the hot seat. His son, Ted, drowned on Windermere only three years into his stint. Twenty years is, give or take, about the average.
The paper I joined in 1979 felt in some ways like a family firm, and in a sense, it still is. I started on the same July Monday as Nick Davies, who went on to become one of the finest reporters of his generation. His career led him into investigations, mine initially into descriptive reporting, columns and features. From the day I arrived, the Guardian felt like a warm bath – a place of sanctuary for free thought and writing.
And I was very firmly a writer: it never occurred to me that I would ever edit any bit of the Guardian, let alone be let loose on the whole thing. I even left at one point, to take my writing elsewhere. But in late 1988 the Guardian badly needed a Weekend magazine to answer the rather brilliant Saturday glossy that had just been launched by the Independent. For some reason, Peter Preston, the Guardian’s then editor, asked me to do it.
I had been diverted down a different journalistic path – one that would lead me, via the launch of G2 in 1992, to take over the editor’s chair on 13 January 1995. I knew enough of the Guardian’s history to feel utterly overawed by the responsibility. Please, please let me not drop the vase.
But, of course, the Guardian is much bigger than any one editor. A rival kindly took me out to lunch soon after I started and reassured me: “If I take a day off, there are six assistant editors who have a completely different view of what my paper should be. If you take the day off, the building itself would produce the Guardian.”
He was right. There is – through a combination of cultural osmosis, ownership and watchful readers – an incredibly strong shared idea of what the Guardian is, even if the job is to reinterpret it for each generation, “in the same spirit as heretofore”.
My first edition appeared the following day, as if nothing had happened, with the splash headline: “EU moves to tighten frontiers”. Plus ca change.
During the first 170-odd years of the Guardian’s life there were, of course, enormous challenges and changes, not least the transformative decision to move from Manchester to London in 1964. But the essentials of newspaper life were the same in 1995, when I took over from Peter Preston, as they had been in 1821, when the paper was launched in response to the Peterloo Massacre of 1819.
Stories were told in words and (more recently) pictures – still black and white, the “proper” medium for news 20 years ago. The rhythm of the day built up to one main deadline, around 9.30pm. We knew the cost of paper, ink, printing and distribution, and could flex the price of advertising, and of the newspaper itself. The readership was overwhelmingly in the UK, and if they ever wanted to get in touch, they did so by phone or letter. It was a world of known knowns.
Twenty years later, we swim in unknown unknowns. We still tell stories in text and pictures, but the words are as likely to be in the form of live blogs as stories. We have learned to use moving pictures as well as stills. We work in audio, interactives, data, graphics and any combination of the above. We distribute our journalism across multiple channels, platforms and devices, including live discussion and debate. We’re on the iWatch; we’re in bed with Facebook; we’re still in the corner shop.
Two thirds of our readership is now outside of the UK: we publish continuously. Virtually all our readers can themselves now be publishers and can connect with one another, and anyone else, as well as us. They contribute to the Guardian in ways that were unimaginable even 15 years ago.
On top of all that, we still produce a newspaper. Or, more precisely, two. The Observer, 30 years older than the Guardian, is in really good health under John Mulholland.
The economic model of what we now do is still in its infancy. Twenty years ago, no one asked a newspaper editor about their business model. Now it’s one of the first questions. And, of course, the Guardian – though extremely financially secure today compared with many periods in its past – is no more immune than any of its rivals to the need to find a sustainable basis for what it does.
Some publishers have decided to erect walls around their digital content and insist on payment. The polar opposites are represented by the Guardian and the Times of London, the latter of which today claims a daily digital audience of around 281,000. In April the Guardian was read by more than 7 million unique browsers a day. On an equal accounting basis, we’re losing (or investing) about the same amount of money. You’ll have to come back in 10 or even 20 years time to find out who judged the future best. But the Guardian – still the eighth-biggest newspaper in the UK – is now vying with the New York Times for the mantle of largest serious English-language newspaper website in the world.
Libel and a life online
FacebookTwitterPinterest Alan Rusbridger and Peter Preston at the High Court in London during the Aitken libel trial in 1997. Photograph: Martin Godwin
So much for the numbers. While sorting through 20 years’ worth of assorted papers in recent weeks – I’m a hoarder rather than a chucker – I made mental divisions for the past two decades. First came the Libel Years, during which it felt as if the Guardian was never out of one court or another. Almost as soon as I took over, there was a procession of MPs, cabinet ministers, lobbyists, cult-busters, quack doctors, corporations, police officers, banks and rich playboys queuing up to injunct or sue us.
There is – thank goodness – much less libel around these days, but those battles were often epic, costly and immensely time-consuming. If you won – which, mostly, we did – they could even be fun. Mostly, they were nerve-racking and exhausting. I’m not sorry to see the slow decline of the London libel industry, and hope that we, alongside other newspapers and free-speech organisations, played a small part in helping to finish it off. And a big thank you to all m’learned friends from over the years. You were expensive. But good.
