Alan Rusbridger has persuaded the rich that reliable information shouldn’t be reserved for the elites. The Guardian, which he edited from 1995 to 2015, is free to online readers. There is no paywall. Instead, readers make voluntary payments, and the income this provides is now high enough that The Guardian is no longer dependent on advertising.
Does The Guardian owe its existence to a wise businessman who understood that journalism is a public service?
It was never intended to make money. That was not why it was founded. By accident as much as design, it has been in the same family now for 200 years. And still, it’s not here to make money. The Guardian is a public service. No-one has ever made themselves rich on the back of The Guardian. There are no shareholders who you have to promise 40% of profits. In fact, for long periods in the past we have made a loss, but there was always someone who subsidized it.
What was it that shaped the founder, John Edward Taylor? Was it his attitude towards money?
Taylor founded The Guardian because he believed the public needed to be informed. There was too much official fake news. He thought somebody had to try to keep the conversation going, based on evidence and facts. He was a businessman so he had to be able to pay the wages, buy paper and ink. But it wasn’t like a start-up today where young people have an agreed plan: they know when to get out, so the venture capital comes in and everyone wants their cut (and they want to be multimillionaires by the age of 40). That was not why The Guardian was started.
There was a big series last year in the Financial Times called ‘purpose before profit’. Even the Financial Times is running series about how companies should be defined by their purpose and by the value they bring, rather than only by the profits they make. What you have, then, is a different kind of company, a so-called social enterprise.
I think – this is just my guess – that in the news business we will need to have more companies defining themselves as social enterprises, and saying: Look, we are not here primarily to get anybody rich. We are here more like the health service, police service. And if you don’t have a clean supply of news, then society is not going to work.
On the other hand, we have Rupert Murdoch who used his money in a completely different way. His media corporation hacked phones and eavesdropped on politicians, the royal family, and people who had lost relatives in terrorist attacks. Those revelations were on front pages. Did Murdoch do it because he wanted to get even more money?
Murdoch is a complicated example. He has done terrible things and has terrible ethical failures, but there are examples of Murdoch running things like The Times or Sky News. These lose money, but he keeps the flow going – so he’s got a bigger purpose. He likes making money, but he makes his money elsewhere. And there are worse examples – like the Barclay brothers in the UK, who bought The Daily Telegraph and insisted they keep the same level of profit from year to year. The only way of achieving that was to wreck the paper, because they replaced good journalists with really cheap ones. Eventually the advertising department ended up running the newspaper. A brilliant newspaper was destroyed.
In your book Breaking News: The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters Now, you write that Rupert Murdoch made you think that democracy in the UK isn’t strong enough; that there are not enough checks and balances.
Murdoch had such dominance in the press in the UK. You shouldn’t allow anybody to build up 40% dominance of the printed national newspaper market. It was the way he used his power – it turned out that part of his technique was to hire criminals to dig into people’s private lives. That made everyone scared of him. Nobody wanted to take him on, including the police, the regulators, members of parliament, and the press. They all thought that Murdoch is a bad man to have as an enemy, which turned out to be terribly undermining of democracy.
Why do you think he did this?
Rupert Murdoch is now an 89-year-old man, he’s not in good health, and he lives thousands of miles away with an immense business selling entertainment films on three continents. If one bit of the company is going wrong, then he has no real sense of managerial control of it. I don’t know if he was actively willing the employment of criminals to dig around in people’s private lives. But the effect of the way that he and his family ran the company was that this kind of stuff happened. I don’t think it was an accident that it happened in a company that was driven by profit and was run by people who lived miles away.
You met Mark Zuckerberg when he was 22. That was not long after he had launched Facebook. If back then he had fallen in love with your way of thinking about journalism, would we be seeing a completely different world nowadays?
He started Facebook on a student campus to do something else. He tapped into this big need to make social communities more capable. And he accidentally stumbled into the problem that bad people would want to use his new platform to spread misinformation and lies. Because he was running a company built by engineers, he didn’t have the in-house capability that a newspaper has, which thinks about these issues all the time. But I think, belatedly, that Mark Zuckerberg has woken up to the fact that he has got a problem and needs help. He is now turning to outsiders as if to say: Look, we are clever engineers and mathematicians, but now we really need help from people who can help us think through this stuff. That seems to be good.
During your 20 years leading The Guardian, your strategy was to reach out to young people, integrating the old ecosystem of information management with the new digital world.
It was incredibly exciting to live through a period where technology that had never existed before sprang into life. We all had to work out what we thought of it, how to make it work and how to make it a good space. I think that, at the moment, technologically, things are not moving as fast as they were 10 years ago. Young people, as much as old people, have the same need for information that is true and reliable. Information chaos is frightening for everyone. We don’t need to look very long for proof – the coronavirus is a great example. There is safety in being told the truth and being able to access the truth. The problem is that many aspects of the ‘old journalism’ were not very good. Let’s take climate change – old media were too slow to acknowledge that it was happening. They thought it was a political question, they downplayed it instead of highlighting the danger. Young people using social media are serious, clever, ethical. They grapple knowledgeably with this problem. Both sides can learn from each other. The old from the young and the young from the old.
It seems that you have always paid attention to the youth. In 1996, only 3% of British households had the internet. You decided to go to the US to see how the internet was being used by newspapers there. You didn’t go on your own. You took a 32-year-old journalist. Did you always feel like you needed support from young people?
I was always interested in this stuff. The people who knew all about it were young. I felt I should take them with me because they understood things that I didn’t understand. It was the same inside The Guardian – we hired 20-year-olds, because in some respects they knew more than we did.
But at the same time it was the youth that made you feel doomed. Around 2006, you met some young entrepreneurs from Palo Alto. You tried to explain to them why you couldn’t simply close the paper edition of The Guardian. You could see on their faces that they didn’t understand what you were talking about.
To them it was so obvious – they knew what was going to happen. In some sense they were right: the old model of publishing was just about to expire. If you were Kodak and you knew that people were no longer going to use film cameras, then why wouldn’t you just switch the whole business to digital? The problem was that digital brought in no cash. And no matter if newspapers were doomed, at least it was some money through the door. We just couldn’t see how we could survive 10 to 15 years digitally with no cash coming through, even if that was our eventual destiny.
So it’s not that easy to infect someone with your way of thinking…
It’s really hard. If you start from scratch and you don’t have the problems of being chained to old ways of working and thinking, then it’s easier. We have experienced this with The Guardian in the US and Australia. We could be digital-only there, and didn’t need to produce a printed version. With digital products, the economics looked different, too. It took 20 years for Amazon to make a profit.
One of your first decisions as editor-in-chief was to start a new ‘Corrections’ column. It showed that you were not afraid of your readers, the crowd. In the first five years, you published 1200 corrections. You clearly believed that this move would build trust. Was it that obvious?
I was never afraid of the crowd. I thought it was a wonderful new resource. These were highly intelligent people who felt part of The Guardian. If we could make them feel even more a part of The Guardian and use them in some ways, then we would benefit.
But having a ‘Corrections’ column is almost like sending a signal that our journalists are not good enough in the subject they are describing. How did you know it would build trust?
Honest journalism is when we inform the readers that we are only humans and we all make mistakes. Journalism is something done in almost impossible circumstances. We are trying to put together something that will in its nature be imperfect.
If we can be honest that this is the nature of the thing we are engaged with, that of course if we get something wrong we will come back and tell you what we got wrong, then you as the reader will place more trust in us. Because we will inform you when we get things wrong. That seems to me obvious.
But a lot of journalists don’t want to do that. They think if we admit we did something wrong, then people won’t trust us. So we are going to make it as hard as possible for people to get in touch with us. That’s why the level of trust in the news media is terrible in most countries. In most companies, it is standard that you have customer service. It’s a great way of learning about your product – you have control of what is happening. But a lot of newspapers don’t want to have anything that looks like customer service: We don’t talk to them. We just give them a newspaper. That’s the way it is. If they want to complain they can always write on the social media.
The Guardian had a separate team called New Media Lab. It was staffed by young people whose job was to think of things that the older generations were not able to come up with. Who would you hire nowadays for this kind of lab?
Probably those specialized in AI and AR – the whole field of AI and how it applies to newsrooms. Also, those with knowledge around data. There is a new breed of journalists who appreciate that the world is full of data, who know how to access it and realize that it can produce extraordinary journalism.
Do you have a religious sensibility?
I’m not brave enough to be an atheist, I’m agnostic.
Your father didn’t finish his scholarship in Africa that was meant to prepare him to be a priest. I wondered whether this attitude towards other people, the crowd – the fact that you are so open, sensitive to it rather than afraid of it – is his influence?
That’s very interesting. I have never thought of it like that.
In your book, you recall the ‘tower and square’ metaphor. Journalists high up in the tower for more than 200 years talked to the crowd gathered down there in the square. The digital era forces us to go down there and meet the crowd, but still we do it reluctantly. The tower is exclusive – everyone has got their own tower. What is yours?
I suppose Oxford University is like a tower. It’s more like the old model of handing down the printed book and passing on knowledge. Handing on the inherited knowledge to the next generation.
But again, in this field you behave differently. You want to get to know your students and focus attention on finding out how children learn.
Especially those with social disadvantages. Again, it comes back to what we were saying earlier about equality and access to information. If you believe that universities are not simply for people who have grown up with great privilege in their life, but are about finding and developing people’s potential, then you have to try to deliberately seek out those people. You have to find those whose potential can be unlocked.
You are constantly thinking of how to change the world for the better.
Yes. I’m trying to think about how to combine social space within the university in terms of making the community work. I set up this group on Facebook where students can ask questions. It’s not just for my briefings. Especially in this time of the coronavirus – so full of imperfect knowledge and worried people – everyone can talk about anything. It is a way to socialize people’s anxieties and problems. Because that’s how the world works today.
Do you think that thanks to the pandemic we will observe a collision between old and new journalism? Collisions, as we know, create new energy – will we see a new ecosystem of information?
A few months before the pandemic, we had a big crisis around the BBC. The government wanted to cut its wings and create something like Fox News. That now looks like lunacy. We see how Fox News has behaved in this crisis – it’s been a disaster. Whereas the BBC has been the place that everyone is turning to. Again that’s the example of news as a public service. Nobody makes a profit out of the BBC; it’s a form of taxation. It’s like clean water – in return we get clean information. This is completely necessary for society to work. So I do imagine the world coming out of the pandemic as a better place.
Parts of this interview have been edited and condensed for clarity and brevity.
Read similar:
