Rusbridger's Guardian

BitDepth#1330

MARK LYNDERSAY

ALAN RUSBRIDGER'S book, Breaking News, pointedly subtitled The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters Now (Picador, 2018), is a mix of pro-journalism polemic, digital migration history and a tortured grappling with the recent political history of the UK Guardian.

Rusbridger led the Guardian as its editor-in-chief from 1995 to 2015, a span of history that changed the fundamentals of what it meant to be a print newspaper in the world.

Rusbridger oversaw the management of a well regarded but relatively small newspaper compared to the titans of Fleet Street.

In 1997, the Guardian's average circulation was 428,010 compared to The Sun's 3,877,097. By 2020, those figures had dropped to 132,341 for the Guardian and 1,250,634 for The Sun, which was no longer the most widely distributed paper in the UK, surpassed by The Metro, a free paper with a circulation of 1,426,535.

Circulation was only one of the challenges the paper would face during Rusbridger's tenure. The Guardian also had to contend with a flood of easily accessed information and disinformation on the internet.

"The market in sensationalist, conspiratorial and alarmist junk seemed to thrive in inverse proportion to the fortunes of the old media houses trying to plod the path of traditional reporting," writes Rusbridger of the eventual power of the social internet.

That challenge would become clearer for Rusbridger as he committed more resources to the paper's internet presence.

"Journalists no longer have a near-monopoly on news and the means of distribution," Rusbridger writes.

"The vertical world is gone forever. Journalists no longer stand on a platform above their readers. They need to find a new voice. They have to regain trust.

"Journalism has to rethink its methods; reconfigure its relationship with the new kaleidoscope of other voices. It has to be more open about what it does and how it does it.”

It's not a perfectly inspirational story. The Guardian benefited from its funding by the Scott Trust, a fund created for its continuance in 1936.

There are few newspapers in the world that report to a sympathetic board committed to the continuance of journalistic enterprise, and most have difficult conversations about falling profits with shareholders.

The larger lessons are worth considering as the backwash of those crushing realities comes ashore in TT and the wider Caribbean region.

Media houses and journalists need to come to grips with the redefining of news as either a public good available to all, or as privileged information exclusively available to those who pay for it.

That has come to mean a decision about whether to have a paywall or not, but it also echoes deeper into the realities of the execution of the news business.

Journalism that is produced as a public good will need to seek new ways to fund its production while privileged news speaks to smaller audiences willing to finance the cost of production.

The evolution of newsgathering and distribution is no place for sentiment.

Of journalism and journalists, Rusbridger writes: "Whatever it was: a craft, a toolkit, a method, a discipline – was failing in its job sufficiently to understand how newly rearranged societies were now working.”

Rusbridger argues that the response to fake news should always be –|journalism. But for that answer to have resonance and value, it must be underwritten by trust, which is no longer a given for someone reporting under a byline.

Trust must now be won through conversation, transparency and engagement with an audience that most journalists previously dealt with as paying punters, hurling letters to the editor from afar into the newsroom.

Today, they are as close as our e-mail inboxes and Twitter feed.

Mark Lyndersay is the editor of technewstt.com. An expanded version of this column can be found there