I'd been looking for this book for a long time. as trust in mainstream media falls to an all-time low, tensions grow between the tech companies and their reporters grow, and publications scramble to wane themselves off fickle Facebook ads, I desperately wanted context on the business side of the media industry.
what institutional incentives and trade-offs did publications face? has corporate accountability journalism always been so controversial? how have journalists adapted their storytelling as social media builds its own niche?
Alan Rusbridger, ex-EIC of The Guardian, answered these questions at more in this memoir-slash-commentary on journalism's digital disruption. by its sheer length, it's easy to see that Rusbridger is a reporter at heart. from The Guardian's early days experimenting with web forums to a rich chronicle of how he navigated the Snowden leaks (one of my favorite chapters), his storytelling lets readers get deep into the head of an editor balancing a philosophical commitment to a free press with competing financial, legal, cultural, and public pressures. this book can be slow at times due to the richness of detail, but it's fine to skim through chapters you find less relevant and drill into the depth of the ones that are.
I was pleasantly surprised to see how well Rusbridger understood the implications of Web 2.0. he clearly respects the power of the internet - that the public can do some tasks (commentary, personal narrative) better than professional journalists, that the social media has held newspapers to account in a new way, that he's been forced to prove the value of their reporting instead of relying on inertia to carry subscriptions. additionally, Rusbridger outlines clear, thoughtful principles for a new "open journalism," the implications of treating journalism as a product vs. a community vs. a public service, and other promising paths forward for a symbiotic relationship between tech, media, and the public.
finally, his ultimate call is to rebuild trust by being honest about what journalism is supposed to be. as candidly explained by David Broder, it's "partial, hasty, incomplete, inevitably somewhat flawed and inaccurate... but the best we could do under the circumstances" - and yet, with its role in supporting an informed and democratic public, still a service worth doing.
Chaotic information was free: good information was expensive. In the horizontal world of twenty-first-century communications – where anyone can publish anything – the germs about rape in Malmo spread indiscriminately and freely. The virus was halfway round the world and the truth had barely even found its boots. Truth – if that’s what journalism offered – was living in a gated community. (Location 138)
Great reporters are rightly celebrated. But they are – generally – only as good as the institution that supports them. If their reporting genuinely challenges power, they will need organisational courage behind them. They will need sharp-eyed text editors and ingenious lawyers. They may require people with sophisticated technological or security know-how. If they get into trouble they may need immediate logistical, medical, legal, financial or PR back-up. They need wise colleagues who have been in the same situations before. If they are lucky, they will have enlightened and strong commercial leaders to support and protect them; and gifted business minds who can bring in the money – but also observe the boundaries that preserve trust. (Location 288)
Around two thirds of the work was what you might call ‘top down’: the newspaper telling the citizens about the workings of the assorted institutions put in place to regulate or order local and civic life. The other third of the news flowed the other way, bottom up. This was not a Bowling Alone world – the deracinated hollowed-out communities described by Robert Putnam 25 years later in America. There was bubbling social and institutional activity all around, and where we lacked the resources to cover it ourselves we recruited local stringers (today they might be called ‘citizen journalists’) to file accounts of discussion groups and scout sports days and charity baking mornings for the local hospital scanner. Every name sold a paper, as the news editor would remind us at regular intervals. We were duly encouraged to cram as many names as possible into our reports. Every picture sold a paper, too, so photographers knew to take group pictures and collect the names for the captions. (Location 412)
There are many things we did not discuss back in 1976. We didn’t talk about business models. The model for the Cambridge Evening News was relatively straightforward: nearly 50,000 people a day parted with money to buy a copy. There was display advertising – a local department store or car showroom promoting a special deal or sale. And then there was the lifeline of local newspapers: classified advertising. The vast majority of second-hand cars or houses in Cambridge and surrounding towns were offered for sale through the pages of the Cambridge Evening News. Every job vacancy was announced in the paper, along with every birth, marriage and death. Every official notification from the council or other public authority: they were all printed at the back of the newspaper between the news and the sport. The profit margins on local papers at their peak – and the mid-’70s were as good a time as any – were in the 30 to 40 per cent range and would continue to be until the end of the century. Nearly 30 years later the regional press was still taking something like 20 per cent of the UK’s advertising spend. (Location 430)
It is the narrative we have often told the world, and which a few journalists might even believe. It usually involves the word ‘truth’: we speak truth to power; we are truth-seekers; we tell uncomfortable truths in order to hold people accountable. The truth about journalism, it’s always seemed to me, is something messier and less perfect. Carl Bernstein, one of the twin begetters of Watergate, goes no further nowadays than ‘the best obtainable version of the truth’. When living in Washington in 1987 I read a new book by the Washington Post’s veteran political commentator David Broder,2 which contained a passage that leaped off the page because it felt so much closer to what journalism actually does. The process of selecting what the reader reads involves not just objective facts but subjective judgments, personal values and, yes, prejudices. Instead of promising ‘All the News That’s Fit to Print’, I would like to see us say over and over until the point has been made … that the newspaper that drops on your doorstep is a partial, hasty, incomplete, inevitably somewhat flawed and inaccurate rendering of some of the things we heard about in the past 24 hours … distorted despite our best efforts to eliminate gross bias by the very process of compression that makes it possible for you to lift it from the doorstep and read it in about an hour. If we labelled the paper accurately then we would immediately add: ‘But it’s the best we could do under the circumstances, and we will be back tomorrow with a corrected updated version…’ (Location 496)
Power needs witnesses. Witnesses need to be able to speak freely to an audience. The truth can only follow on from agreed facts. Facts can only be agreed if they can be openly articulated, tested … and contested. That process of statement and challenge helps something like the truth to emerge. From truth can come progress. In the absence of this daylight, bad things will almost certainly happen. The acts of bearing witness and establishing facts can lead to positive reform. By the start of the twenty-first century these might – in relatively enlightened democracies – seem unremarkable statements, but 200 years ago these were comparatively new propositions. (Location 597)
A newspaper has two sides to it. It is a business, like any other, and has to pay in the material sense in order to live. But it is much more than a business; it is an institution; it reflects and it influences the life of a whole community; it may affect even wider destinies. It is, in its way, an instrument of government. It plays on the minds and consciences of men. It may educate, stimulate, assist, or it may do the opposite. It has, therefore, a moral as well as a material existence, and its character and influence are in the main determined by the balance of these two forces … It may make profit or power its first object, or it may conceive itself as fulfilling a higher and more exacting function. I think I may honestly say that, from the day of its foundation, there has not been much doubt as to which way the balance tipped so far as regards the conduct of the paper whose fine tradition I inherited and which I have had the honour to serve through all my working life. Had it not been so, personally I could not have served it. (Location 624)