5 minutes with the chief editor of *The Guardian*
Last year I managed to get a moment with Alan Rusbridger while I was working at Livity. He was visiting the offices to talk about youth engagement, I asked him a few general questions about Digital media and citizen journalism.
Ayman: Lets start with the golden question - What would your advice be to a journalist who aspired to reach your kind of position, as a chief editor?
Alan: There used to be a ladder into journalism, where you would start at a local paper and work your way up. Now, with the rise of the internet and blogs, the openings are much greater. Anyone can upload or publish anything, so now it is all about practising. Writing is a skill which you have to keep practising. I mean it doesn’t have to be writing, it could be video or audio work, but whatever media skill it is, it is key to keep practising. Sooner or later, when you get good, people will begin to take notice and you will gain exposure and people will begin to read what you are writing.
So given that there is a movement in media towards ‘citizen journalism’ do you think that content is going to lose its accuracy?
It shouldn’t do. There are general rules in journalism which people generally stick to, getting facts right and making things clear, and of course using trusted sources. I don’t think there is anything about being a citizen journalist which makes your reporting more unreliable.
A problem with digital journalism is that it is all about the amount of clicks and visitor numbers a site receives. Do you think this digitization is a problem in the sense that people possibly get less engaged?
Increasingly advertisers are getting more interested in engagement as well as clicks. Clicks are still interesting to us because we find out the amount of people finding our pages, but the new technologies we have to measure engagement are what advertisers are finding more interesting.
Where do you think the future of journalism lies then. Is it the internet?
There is no question that digital publishing is the media revolution. Take it back 20 years, the people who had access to the media were the people who owned it. Now, however, everyone has access to the media and anyone can be journalist. I think this is a big change in journalism in general, and it is where journalism seems to be going at the moment with citizen journalists and blogs.
The Guardian used to be a big national paper, but now it has evolved into an international publication and platform. Where do you see The Guardian now?
I think it has several different identities. It is a newspaper, which I hope will go on for a long time. There is a website, and applications across all the major phones including Android and BlackBerry. It is also now much less about us telling you what to believe, but more about us presenting the case and the reader making his mind up. This is a fundamental change in journalism across the board as media outlets are trying to do this more often.
‘The Guardian has doggedly pursued the phone-hacking scandal until recently it had been a lonely figure on reporting it” That’s a quotation from you. Why do you think the rest of the media were so reluctant to catch on to this story?
Well, it’s sometimes things like newspapers following a stupid rule like, ‘that’s not our story, it’s your story’. What the general media failed to see was that this was deeper than just any media story, it was about British public life and how the whole media is perceived. For example questions such as why did the police not do anything? Why did the regulators not do anything? It was more than just any media story, but an insight into the place of media in society.
Thanks for your time Alan!
