Book review: Breaking news – the remaking of journalism and why it matters

Review by Iain MacWhirter

Journalists: can't live with them, can't live without them. It's a rough old trade, as any mature hack will admit over a pint or G&T. Newspapers were doing fake news long before fake news became a thing – remember the Sun's “Freddy Star Ate My Hamster”? As Alan Rusbridger recounts, the UK popular press ruined the public image of journalism through sensationalism, inaccuracy and criminality. It can't expect people to defend it in its digital hour of need.

The internet has destroyed the business model, but we can't do without newspapers. This is because, as Rusbridger puts it: “reliable, unpolluted information is as necessary to a community as a legal system, an army or a police force”. Unpolluted information is in increasingly short supply, as we drown in junk news from a myriad of digital sources. Democracy requires reliable intelligence, not just “content”. With populism on the march and politics infected by twitter wars, we can see the post-news future, and it doesn't work.

The model that dominated the last 200 years is definitely dead, according to Rusbridger. Worse, the new model has yet to be born. “There are no endings, happy or otherwise”, he writes in this engaging, informed and readable account of his 20 years as Guardian editor. Rusbridger is rightly proud of achievements, like the Pulitzer Prize for the Snowden revelations, which revealed the bulk collection of data. But Breaking News isn't an exercise in nostalgia for the “legacy media”. In fact, he seems rather eager to say good bye to all that.

Rusbridger sees the future as involving ground-up, crowd-sourced “open journalism”. Unlike most press commentators, he's rather favourably disposed toward Twitter. He likes multi-post “threads” which allow informed folk, like human rights lawyers, to deconstruct bad news stories. He likes the fact that journalists can correct their work in real time on Twitter, and add links which inform debate. This could be the antidote to fake news: Twitter could be a kind of social version of Wikipedia, endlessly correcting itself until truth is distilled.

But I think he inhabits a rather different Twitter universe from the one I live in. Most Twitter feeds are polluted by abuse, dog-piling and endless rambling exchanges, which rapidly become incoherent as angry participants seek to distort, select and misrepresent tweets with which they disagree. People then retreat into their safe-space filter bubbles and blame their political opponents for random abuse, as in Labour's anti-semitism row. Informed debate, it isn’t.

Moreover, ad-based algorithms on social media are designed to feed our prejudices by serving up posts that conform to our “likes”. This is insidious, divisive, and open to manipulation, as Rusbridger is fully aware. After all, it was his sister paper, the Observer, which broke the scandal of data mining and Cambridge Analytica. But if you can’t beat em...

He is candid about the Guardian's efforts to mine data from its vast readership and “monetise” it by using targeted advertising. Everyone is at it. But the Guardian could never compete with the West Coast behemoths, Facebook and Google, who between them, according to the Guardian's current editor, Kath Viner, rake in 99% of all new online advertising dollars in the US.

Rusbridger tried to emulate the tech start ups by pursuing a policy of “reach over revenue” - in other words racking up losses in the hope of dominating market share. He refused to adopt a paywall, gave Guardian content away free, and invested in ventures like Guardian America in the hope of making his paper a global brand. It was a success. In 2014, the Guardian overtook the New York Times as the most read digital quality newspaper on the planet.

However, it was unable to translate market share into revenue. The next year the Guardian lost £53 million, and has since had to embark on brutal cost-cutting, of the kind with which Scottish and regional newspapers are only too familiar. Rusbridger insists that the paper is now on an even keel and is making money, but he admits it was a close run thing.

Had it not been for revenues from Autotrader magazine, owned by its parent company, the Guardian would probably have folded under its losses. There is an obvious irony that this environmentally-conscious publication, which has campaigned so vocally on climate change, should owe its very existence to the fossil fuel industry. Rusbridger insists that the Guardian's owners are now divesting themselves of all their unclean investments.

The inconvenient truth is that journalism, as it developed over the last 100 years, has been financed, not by its readers, but by advertising revenue. Indeed, this is what gave newspapers a degree of independence. They could afford to challenge their readers' expectations and prejudices because they didn't depend solely on cover-price. Newspapers had the luxury of competing in terms of accuracy of news and quality of writing, rather than propaganda. The Guardian now gains much of its revenue from crowd-funding, and it shows in its pages. When newspapers finally shut up shop, and go entirely online, we may find that they become essentially, websites along the lines of Wings Over Scotland, which are unashamedly partisan.

That newspapers are still around, despite all the forecasts of their imminent demise, is largely because no one has worked out what the future is going to look like. As Rusbridger admits, many Guardian journalists felt that he betrayed the paper's values by giving away its content and reordering the news desks so that they were led by digital advertising. This book is largely an attempt to explain why he did it. Breaking News is part a resume of the Guardian's greatest hits – Jonathan Aitken, Wikileaks, Snowden, phone hacking – part autobiography, recounting tales from Rusbridger's early days in local journalism, and partly a defence of his management of the Guardian during the Great Disruption. It's a right riveting read, as we say in the trade. But the jury's out on whether Alan Rusbridger is one of the saviours of the press, or one of its grave diggers.