Abstract
Few journalists manage fundamentally to alter the trade in which they work. One who has, explains how he did it
After 20 years and four months Alan Rusbridger stepped down from the editorship of The Guardian on May 28. Katharine Viner took over as editor-in-chief of Guardian News and Media, to give the job its full title. She had returned to New York, where she headed the US Guardian website, after her appointment in March, and then, as Rusbridger put it, “very sensibly went to Costa Rica to do yoga, out of touch, no emails”. Rusbridger will become chair of the Scott Trust, the ultimate owner of The Guardian and The Observer, print and online, when the present incumbent Dame Liz Forgan retires next year.
Rusbridger was the 10th editor in The Guardian's 190-year history, the third in succession to serve for 20 years. His paper won Newspaper of the Year in the British Press Awards four times on his watch – 1999, 2006, 2011 and 2014. The circulation fell from a little over 400,000 to its current 180,000. The Guardian and The Observer were redesigned in 2005 in the compact “Berliner” format. The Guardian's global online audience rose from about nothing to more than 120 million monthly unique browsers, winning a succession of prestigious online awards, most notably Webbys. And last year The Guardian became the first British media organisation to win the most prestigious award in journalism, the Pulitzer Prize for public service. This award was for the Snowden revelations, one of several huge stories with great reverberations which The Guardian broke during the Rusbridger years.
Just before he vacated the editorial chair, I visited Rusbridger in The Guardian's offices behind London's King's Cross station and he reflected on his years in charge. It was the second time I had interviewed him, the first 36 years earlier when I was The Guardian's news editor and he was seeking a newsroom reporting job. He then worked on the Cambridge Evening News. He was reserved at interview, not one of those who sought to “sell” himself. But he had sent in a spectacularly good set of cuttings, demonstrating that he was a naturally good writer. I recommended him to the editor, Peter Preston, who was not to know in 1979 that he was hiring his successor. The paper he joined could hardly have been more different from the news organisation he bequeathed to Viner. But Rusbridger's early years on The Guardian were like those of decades of journalists before him. He did traditional reporting, wrote the diary, wrote features. The word that would define his years as editor – digital – featured hardly at all. The nearest he got to digital technology was in 1986 when he left The Guardian to succeed Clive James as TV critic of the Observer (before it was owned by The Guardian).
He went on to become Washington correspondent of the London Daily News, Robert Maxwell's short-lived London paper. Perhaps showing first signs of the determination that would lead him to editorship, his reaction to the announcement of the LDN closure was decisive. He got on the next plane to London and while colleagues were coming to terms with redundancy he was sitting outside Maxwell's office demanding to see the proprietor. He sat there most of a day, ignoring attempts to get him to leave, until Maxwell opened his door and called him in to agree compensation terms. That achieved, Rusbridger headed on to The Guardian where he arranged to return as a feature writer. It was a successful couple of days.
His career moved rapidly then. He was responsible for the launches of Guardian Weekend and the G2 section. He became deputy editor in 1994 and editor in 1995. He says there was no ambition to edit The Guardian when he joined. “My children tell me I'm terribly ambitious – in which case, if they say I am, I must be, but it's never felt like that. When I was working for the Cambridge Evening News I never felt I would get a job in London. I hadn't thought of editing at all until Peter (Preston) approached me to edit the Weekend Guardian. I have seen quite a lot of journalists who are eaten up with ambition and got their lives plotted out. I'm never like that. It makes no sense. Until Peter took me out to lunch and told me he was standing down I don't think I had consciously thought this is the job I must have. Or desperately want.” By then there was never any doubt that he would see off three internal candidates and get the job.
In 2007 in the Lowry theatre in Manchester I was sitting on The Guardian table at the Society of Editors conference dinner. Rusbridger was surrounded by members of his staff and there was only one thing they wanted to talk about, and touch. The first iPhone had just been launched in Britain, and he had one. Nobody else had. They talked of little else throughout the meal. Rusbridger looked very happy.
Was Rusbridger a digital native? He certainly was in 2007, but when he became editor in 1995 he was, he said, becoming digital, “as much as anyone was.” He went to America in the year before on a digital fact-finding mission. “We went to Chicago, San Francisco and Colorado in about three days, and I came back absolutely incredibly excited by everything I'd seen. I wrote a memo for Peter and I said there's this thing called the internet and it's going to be really big. I flew over three of the big people we'd met for a conference. Peter was there, but he was 19 years into the job then and it was never going to be his thing.”
Digital die was cast
The Guardian's New Media Lab was established by the board when Rusbridger had been editor for six months “to implement the proposed electronic publication of The Guardian and The Observer”. The die was cast.
“I suppose I became convinced early on that the digital world was going to be an incredibly important bit of life. I became convinced that this was going to be the future of news and that while newspapers would be around for a long time, probably my job as editor of The Guardian was to get The Guardian into a shape where if print stopped becoming viable we had made enough progress to be able to live as a digital thing alone.”
Rusbridger admits there were only pockets of enthusiasm for the digital project at that time, hardly any on the editorial floor. He had allies in the then advertising director (later CEO) Carolyn McCall and the marketing director David Brook. “They had a place in the basement where they were developing this little thing called the Guide to boost the Saturday edition.”
The next period led to the launch of Guardian Unlimited (GU) in 1999, bringing together a range of sites The Guardian had started. Rusbridger decided to bring his New York correspondent Ian Katz (now editor of BBC's Newsnight, and another candidate for The Guardian editorship) home to take control of GU.
“It was a real signal bringing him back from New York. At that point most newspapers were thinking digital's a techie thing so we'll put a techie in charge of it. I said no, we have to put the most brilliant journalist in charge of it because if it doesn't work journalistically it's not going to work. Ian didn't know anything about digital but he was clearly a rising star on the editing front. Ian imported a lot of men with beards and long hair and went and sat in an office over the road. They said we can't just put a newspaper online which is what most people were doing. They said this is a completely different medium and you can treat things completely differently. That was fundamental from the very beginning.”
Rusbridger knew the time had come for total commitment to the digital project and sent Katz to see the then chairman of The Guardian Media Group, the late Lord (Bob) Gavron: “The whole thing has been a process of persuasion. The first thing was to persuade Bob Gavron that Ian Katz could have some money to start this thing up. We had no idea what was appropriate and Bob didn't know anything about digital. So Ian went and soft-soaped Bob and got £3 million. And then Bob woke up the next morning and said, how was I so easily persuaded, there's no money in this, and cut it back to a million. But it was enough to get it airborne.”
Rusbridger recalls Simon Waldman, another key figure in the early web days (he now works for Amazon Video), returning from San Francisco and telling the board about Craig Newmark whose Craigslist advertising website was destroying the American newspaper industry. “I was on the board by then,” said Rusbridger, “and I said they're going to destroy the Manchester Evening News. Someone said ‘Why don't we sell it tonight?’” But it was still producing much needed cash, so that was not an option. But Rusbridger believes they held on to it for too long. It was sold in 2010 for very little.
Emily Bell was the next pivotal figure to join Rusbridger's digital project, becoming editor-in-chief of Guardian Unlimited in 2001 (she now runs the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University, and was also a candidate for The Guardian editorship). This was the beginning of the second phase, the introduction of social media and “open journalism” which Rusbridger describes as “journalism that makes the maximum usage of the entire publishing ecosystem in which you're working”. It means opening up the paper for contributions by readers, accepting that others have something interesting to say. Rusbridger believes it is hard to be “open” and yet charge via a pay wall.
“Emily Bell was on a different floor with her GU team and all her developers. We had an enormous team that built the whole platform on which the whole thing could sit. We spent about £10m completely building what was essentially a production system to produce a newspaper and a website at the same time. I realised at some point that Emily was producing a “mirror” Guardian – print had a political correspondent, she had a political correspondent. She just thought these were different worlds and she couldn't hang around waiting for the newspaper to produce content for her. She decided she would have to do it entirely separately. I was positively encouraging her; it seemed to me the most effective way of doing this was to create a completely different unit that operated to digital rules.”
Neanderthals in print
It meant there were two empires, print and digital, but when The Guardian moved to King's Place in 2008 it was to one newsroom. “It was a difficult decision because Emily said she could see why we wanted to do that but it would destroy the pure digital quality of her people. She said, ‘I know what's going to happen, these Neanderthals in print are going to take my beautiful finely honed digital engine and think they can run it, and all they're going to do is slow everything down.’ And to some extent she was right.
“But I couldn't see how you could keep on running two empires. We realised there was going to be a cost. In an organisation with a newspaper which is immensely labour intensive to produce, the print conversation is always going to dominate.”
The problem was that the most important (print) deadline was 7.00pm, but digital readers were turning on their mobiles at 7.00 in the morning, and if they didn't have the latest news they went elsewhere. So digital and print had to be separated in the same newsroom.
“We had to tell print, ‘Please go and produce the best newspaper you can. We love your newspaper but the main thing has to be digital.’ So it became a different kind of digital first.”
The launch of a new American site in 2007 to reflect the growing audience there was followed in 2008 with the rebranding of Guardian Unlimited as guardian.co.uk. In that year it recorded 20 million monthly users, the first UK-based newspaper website to do so. It went through 30 million in 2012.
The Australian website launched in May 2013, and two months later the whole global operation moved to a new domain theguardian.com. There were now around 50 website staff in New York, 25 in Australia, and a London editorial staff, serving print and digital, of about 660. The current global digital audience of 120 million is divided about one third each UK:US:rest of the world.
While digital development was the constant preoccupation, the “how” of publishing news, Rusbridger's editorship was equally defined by “what” was published: the succession of big and controversial investigative exclusives. He admits he was not himself an investigative journalist, although points out that he was highly commended in the young journalist category of the British Press Awards while he was working at the Cambridge Evening News.
“The winner was Tina Brown. I have a picture of myself shaking hands with Prince Charles. It was an investigation into the Cambridge Symphony Orchestra and the involvement in it of a Walter Mitty character, a harmless fantasist with a colourful past. I'm not the greatest at investigative journalism on the planet, but somehow we did create a culture here where that stuff mattered. We gave people time and resource to do it. And I think the more you do the more you earn it. Snowden came to us because he knew we would treat it properly.”
The list shows the range and significance of these investigations: Jonathan Aitken jailed for perjury; Neil Hamilton and the cash-for-questions affair; the death of Ian Tomlinson, the newspaper vendor who died after being struck by a policeman during the G20 demo in 2009; rendition and torture; relationships between undercover cops and those they were investigating; tax avoidance by large corporations; WikiLeaks; the Snowden files; and News of the World phone hacking.
While these investigations have done much for The Guardian's reputation and profile they have done nothing to prevent the circulation decline that has affected all newspapers. Rusbridger is clearly irritated that huge growth online is ignored in this context. “You can't say of a paper that's read by seven million people a day ‘Well that's just web readers; they don't count.’ These big stories have contributed to a vast increase in the readership of The Guardian.
“On any narrow definition of return on investment no accountant would allow you to do any investigations. But over time, people think of The Guardian as a paper that does journalism as journalism should be done. This is a paper that speaks the truth, stands up to power, gets into debt, is not frightened of big targets – that's the kind of paper I believe in. You have to have a very understanding board, which we do have. Here they do buy that argument.”
But there have been plenty of critics, particularly on other papers. Some have said publishing the Snowden material was irresponsible and could undermine western security. Rusbridger was visited by the Cabinet Secretary and told that the prime minister and his most senior cabinet colleagues were extremely concerned about what he was doing. Eventually he was told security service agents would be coming to The Guardian to seize the hard drives containing the Snowden documents. But by then the material was in The Guardian's New York office from which it was published legally. The London hard drives were destroyed all the same.
“To do it in America,” said Rusbridger, “with no threat from the state and with everyone thinking that's a really interesting story raises so many issues. It was completely liberating and lovely. It was followed up all over the world. To be in America at the time it was happening, knowing it was going to reverberate from the White House down, for months and years to come, how often does that happen in a journalistic career? And then to return a year later and get the Pulitzer prize for public service. That was how Americans saw us.”
Little criticism of Snowden story
Rusbridger says he has had conversations with senior politicians and security people since the Snowden revelations and he has found little criticism of what The Guardian did. They were aware of the issues that had been raised. The Americans thought The Guardian had behaved very responsibly. There had to be a public debate about consent, privacy and data storage, and The Guardian had provoked that. Apple and Google had improved their encryption faster than they had planned and the world is now a much more encrypted place (as is The Guardian).
Rusbridger likes to play down the idea that there is mutual hostility between The Guardian and the rest of the national press, despite the frequent disparaging references to each other in The Guardian and the Daily Mail. Does he hate the Mail?
“No I don't. I think there's a lot of good things about it. It has strange hobby horses and obsessions and aggressions. But it's one of the most energetic and professional interrogators of power; some of it is really good.”
He says that when The Guardian published the story that Milly Dowler's phone had been hacked (which brought the hacking story to a head and brought about the closure of the News of the World) the first person to phone him with congratulations was the Daily Mail editor-in-chief Paul Dacre.
And Murdoch? “I think I'm quite balanced about Murdoch. He's invested a lot. Kept The Times going. Wapping was necessary and transformative. I think on the kindest interpretation, the company was out of control and it took a long time to face up to what was going on. They were incredibly aggressive to anybody who questioned their version of events and gave them the hairdryer treatment. But I think it's probably much better run now.”
In the end, says Rusbridger, what would other editors have done? If as an editor you had the Snowden dossier, or learned there had been a massive cover-up in the biggest media organisation in Britain, are you telling me any Fleet Street editor wouldn't have run those stories?”
Rusbridger, because of his board and trust responsibilities as well as editorship, has spent most of his time as editor dealing with money alongside words. Although some others envy The Guardian's trust structure and absence of proprietor, those charged with maintaining its existence have had periods of anxiety. Andrew Miller, chief executive of The Guardian Media Group (he announced at the beginning of this year that he would be standing down) warned in 2012 that the group was in danger of running out of money in five years.
“Well there was a period when it got a bit tense,” said Rusbridger. “We had about £200 million in the bank. We hadn't got the Auto Trader money yet. When the whole world went tits up in 2008–09: we lost about £40 million of classified revenue a year which was impossible to replace. All newspapers went into a completely torrid time.”
That was not obvious from the outsid; The Guardian moved (in late 2009) into impressive new offices. The conversion of the broadsheet to Berliner format in 2005 was costly, including investing £80 million in new printing presses; staffing grew; digital development in London was hugely costly and brought little initial return. The American and Australian websites were launched, and Rusbridger was deeply associated with all these decisions.
Rusbridger says that for the first 12 years of his editorship The Guardian made money, and for the last eight has had to “dip into the kitty”. (“The Observer loses shedloads of money,” he adds). “We had to invest in digital or there wouldn't be a Guardian. People are tremendously forgiving of Buzzfeed and Amazon and Vice, all these things that aren't making money, because they can see a start-up model, which you can't expect to make money from day one. Then they get tremendously cross with legacy media and say it's not investment; for you it's losses. I can't imagine a world in which you're doing print where you wouldn't want to invest; so you can call it losses or you can call it investment. If you wanted to run the paper at a profit you could do it now, but it would be an extraordinarily short-sighted thing to do.”
The Guardian is, however, now in a healthier situation. It sold its stake in Auto Trader for £619 million and now has a “cash and investment fund” (reserves) of £842 million. Its stake in Top Right Group (formerly EMAP), which will be sold at some point, is around £200 million. Digital revenues are now rising strongly, up to over £80 million in the last financial year. The new medium which so many feared would never make money is now doing so.
“I think for a new editor to come in with a billion pounds in the bank is quite a nice position,” says Rusbridger.
Launching “Club Guardian”
Look at The Guardian any day and you'll find large adverts headed “If you read The Guardian, join The Guardian”. Each is written by a “name” Guardian journalist and invites readers to become members, to attend Guardian events, meet Guardian journalists, debate the great issues of the day, interact. You can be a patron for £60 a month (it's described as a back stage pass to The Guardian), a partner for £15 a month, a friend free.
It is easy to be cynical about this concept of “Club Guardian”, but it is, Rusbridger stresses, serious, commercial and heavily researched. He even used the phrase “brand extension”. We are discussing perceptions of The Guardian – a cause, a cult, a political movement, precious, elitist?
Rusbridger will have none of it. “The tricky thing for people who want to denigrate us in that way is we're now the biggest overall thing in Britain (he means the online audience) apart from the Mail. It's difficult to say The Guardian is a little club of muesli eating whatevers because we're so much bigger than anyone else. It can't be a club or a cult; this is a big, general readership, mainstream news organisation.”
I put to him a series of words used to describe him: father figure, autocratic, opaque, inscrutable, gnomic. Did he recognise these descriptions? “Most of them to some extent, yes. I don't know if I'm autocratic.”
So why is he leaving now? He still seems thoroughly engaged in the project; no outward signs of weariness. A young 61. Rusbridger says it started last year when discussion about a replacement for Liz Forgan as chair of the Scott Trust began. “I thought one of the most important jobs here is the chair. It has to be a journalist, always has been, always should be. It was the head hunter who said, ‘I don't understand why you don't do it.’ I said I didn't know, but if they'd like me to, I'd think about that. The Trust said yes, do that. You'd have to step down (from the editorship) first. I said I'd think about it over the summer. I'd done 19-and-a-half years at that point, quite a stint, and there were at least two or three good internal people (to succeed me), so actually it all seemed to come together. So I went back to them and said; ‘if you want me, I'll do it.’”
That starts next year. But first, in the autumn, he takes up the job of principal of Lady Margaret Hall, the 137-year-old Oxford college which didn't admit men until 1979. How will that be, very quiet? “Yeah, lovely,” says Rusbridger. “It felt a bit like The Guardian when I first went there, a 19th century institution born out of reform. Women. Incredibly nice warm people. And Oxford's got internet institutes, the Reuters Institute, climate change institutes, lots of things that I'm interested in. So I submitted myself to interview, by 45 people, one of six candidates, and they said they wanted me.”
How would he feel as the new editor having Alan Rusbridger as chair of the Trust, possibly finding it hard to disengage from the project he has been immersed in for 20 years? “I am constitutionally not allowed to discuss the direction of the paper with Kath, or anything like that. What Hugo (Young, Trust chair when Rusbridger became editor) and Liz were to me were fantastic sounding boards. Wise heads, defenders of the journalistic order, protectors of the independence of the editor. I think Kath would welcome having me in that role. I'm not going to be breathing down her neck.”