Alan Rusbridger opens Society of Editors annual conference with Society of Editors Lecture
( October 19, 2015, London, Sri Lanka Guardian) Alan Rusbridger, former editor of The Guardian opened the Society of Editors annual conference this evening by delivering the Society of Editors Lecture.
The full text of his speech is available below:
“Thank you for asking me to give this talk tonight, especially as I am no longer a proper bone fide hack.
I now spend most of my time in Oxford – another place dedicated to curiosity and finding out things, but without the constant deadlines and the bun fights. At least so far.
When I took my daughters to see Lady Margaret Hall just after Christmas we wandered around the deserted, frosty, ostensibly peaceful college gardens
“It’s lovely, dad,” said my eldest daughter. “But you’re going to have to watch out. It’s dangerous.”
“Oxford?” I said. “Really?”
“Dad,” she said impatiently “Have you never seen Inspector Morse? People like you get murdered every week.”
The process for becoming a head of house was far more terrifying than anything I encountered as a journalist, culminating in session in which all 45 fellows of the college sat in a horseshoe and interrogated me for an hour.
For the first time in my life, I felt quite warmly about Keith Vaz.
But at least it was nothing like the episode of Morse, which dealt with the election of a new Master to succeed Sir Clixby Bream. Which is a proper name for an Oxford master. By the end of the episode there were three corpses, including that of a local newspaper reporter who had a sideline in blackmail.
The process at LMH seems to have been quite harmonious in comparison.
I haven’t completely given up journalism – and next autumn I return as Chair of the Scott Trust, which has safeguarded the editorial mission of the Guardian since 1936 – but I do have one foot out of the door.
On giving up the Guardian editorship at the end of May I took myself off to Chennai to teach a future generation of Indian journalists. That was incredibly rewarding. And hot. By the time I came back to London three weeks later I was a cured editor. It was much cheaper than the Priory.
The change to leading an academic institution hasn’t been as sharp a break with the past as maybe I’d anticipated. At the ceremony last week when I was installed at LMH – you’ve all read about these bizarre Oxford initiation rituals, but this one involved no dead animals – I chose two texts about the origins of the main institutions in my new life, both 19th century products of reform.
The Manchester Guardian was founded in 1821 out of the burning conviction of John Edward Taylor – who had seen innocent protestors massacred in broad daylight at Peterloo – that there was a kind of sacred duty in being a reporter, a true witness. Lady Margaret Hall was founded 57 years later to right a different kind of wrong: the conviction among the elders of Oxford that a university education was for men, not for women.
Both are there to find things out, to push at the boundaries of knowledge. Both are collegiate and collaborative in their style: neither has anyone telling them what to do. Their choices and fate, for better or worse, are in their own hands. Neither institution had much money, but nor were they ever designed to make huge profits. They feel recognisably similar
And both are slight outsiders. It was 150 years before the Guardian established base camp in London … and it never made it further south than Farringdon Road. The founders of LMH felt it was more decorous to be situated on the other side of the university parks.
And, of course, to outsiders there’s sometimes a feeling that they will never be true members of a club of insiders.
And Fleet Street – to use the old shorthand – did, and does, sometimes feel like a bit of a club, with its own unwritten rules and articles of belief.
I don’t think local newspapers have ever felt like a club. Nor, it seems to me, do our broadcasters, or even the newspaper markets in America or Europe. But Fleet Street sometimes does.
Being a cured editor maybe lends a further bit of distance. For better or for worse. Being a little distant, Fleet Street really does strike you as rather exceptional in every sense of the term.
It produces some of the most exceptional journalism in the world – aggressive, unflinching, searching, stylish, funny, erudite, plain speaking, independent. And, if we’re honest, it produces some exceptionally awful journalism.
And it’s also exceptional the way its unique history, origins, traditions and ownership have combined to forge what it is today.
It is very unlike newspaper markets in other parts of the world, or even in the UK. But sometimes we behave as though it is the norm in journalism. For better and for worse, it really isn’t.
It used to be a place of swagger and confidence.
Sometimes today those qualities seem to have changed a bit. The swagger can occasionally come across more like hectoring or bullying.
And the immense confidence that Fleet Street once exuded has worn thin. We’ve started – occasionally – behaving as though the whole world is ganging up on us and it’s not fair. We can act as though we’re in the bunker.
So I want to talk tonight about confidence. Where it went. How to get it back.
Confidence in dealing with others, not all of who wish us ill. And confidence in using our most valuable asset beyond our own staff: our readers.
Of course, it’s quite understandable why we’ve feeling a bit vulnerable. The whole world may not be ganging up on us, but these past 10 years have been pretty brutal ones for most. And for some – for those who want to grasp the opportunities new technologies bring – exhilarating as well.
Virtually everything about the technologies we used when I joined the Cambridge Evening News as an indentured reporter 40 years ago has either become obsolete or is on the way out.
There has probably been nothing like the speed and impact of technological change since the 15th century.
The economic model that sustained what we did is completely up in the air, to put it mildly.
Revolutions are never comfortable. The invention of movable type directly led to the most radical transformation of entire societies. The same is happening today, only more so.
Journalism doesn’t allow much time at the edges for discovery and reflection about where this digital revolution is leading.
It didn’t help that, just as we were adjusting to the new economics and hoping that we could negotiate the transition smoothly, the world economy abruptly collapsed. The timing of the severest financial crisis since the great depression couldn’t have been more difficult.
Even newspapers that had been highly profitable were plunged into loss. Some managements panicked and went for a scorched earth policy with newsrooms, which – usually – only made things worse.
You could smell the loss of confidence in newspapers and their websites.
Even if you could make time to think, seeing over the digital horizon was so difficult. There were no immediate revenues, only additional costs: and that’s really hard if you have shareholders quite naturally wanting returns.
Many of the most confident of our new world competitors don’t have those pressures – yet. Some of them barely make a profit, or deliberately invest in a way guaranteed to perpetuate losses for the time being. But – in their world, with their confidence – that makes complete sense. They are investing for a future they’re confident will arrive.
What a contrast with some players in our own world, unconfident, frozen in the headlights as these new digital players scamper in, worrying less about immediate profits and understanding much more about the technologies and how the world of information is changing faster than we could imagine.
And then – just as we were coping with all that – we were hit by a massive ethical disaster – our own banking crisis, our own Deepwater Horizon, our own Volkswagen. An industry that existed to hold others to account was itself held up to harsh scrutiny. And that, of course, is always horribly uncomfortable.
I know some of you may think the Guardian stepped out of the club when it exposed criminal behavior in our own business. If that’s still considered poor form then there are parts of the club rules that, even after 40 years, I have still failed to understand.
If it was bad form then It would have required a conversation between an editor and a reporter which went: ”Nick, I know that’s a terrific story, and were it about any other industry I’d run it in the blink of an eye. But I must ask you to stop asking these questions and forget what you know.”
What a betrayal of journalism that would have been. And what a betrayal of the foot soldiers within the News of the World who were the ones feeding Nick his information precisely because they so hated having to do what the culture of that particular organization at that particular time demanded of them.
They didn’t go into journalism to illegally hack into people’s private lives. And for us not to have written the story because dog was not suppose to eat dog would have been a further blow to journalism and the ideals we’re supposed to stand for.
But – as we all know – when we write our stories we can’t always predict the consequences. There was duly a crisis – which spread beyond journalism into the police, the regulator and politics. Whether or not it was handled with transparency, confidence and skill is for future press historians to judge.
The regulator – not that, now, anyone thinks it was actually a regulator – tried to blame the accusers rather than the offenders. The corporate executive and proprietorial classes couldn’t possibly admit to having known anything about wrong doing and were forced to argue, instead, that everything had been totally out of control among the foot soldiers.
A newspaper was closed in a panic. And then, in a piece of wild over compensation, a newspaper management broke the one sacred law to which we all subscribe and handed over all its sources to the police.
It’s an article of faith of some people in the Club that the ensuing inquiry was a completely and utterly terrible thing.
I’m not sure it was – though there have certainly been bad consequences as well as good.
My sense on the day Leveson itself was published was actually a mood of slight relief. The aftermath to Leveson – as opposed to the report itself – was a different matter.
Good things undoubtedly have flowed from this period. I’m not one of those who think we’re in a new dark age.
The dark age was a tiny number journalists – remember there are as many as 70,000 of us in the UK who have never hacked a phone – felt pressured to do cruel and criminal things. They believed that’s what their managements wanted. That was a dark age. I do think we’ve cleaned up our act and that Fleet Street is a better place as a result. Not least for reporters who, when the chips are down, turn out to be the most exposed.
But there have been bad consequences too.
The Royal Charter, dreamed up in Whitehall by some very clever people, was a medieval piece of flummery.
Exemplary damages felt like something MPs wanted, but no one else.
The whole system of carrots and sticks – intended as an incentive to signing up – did not win the backing of any practising media lawyer I know.
The flow of information between police and journalists is at an all time low. For that blame may lie less with Leveson than in three other factors: the Filkin report; the character of individual police commissioners; and, to be fair, in the habit of some newspapers in paying cops for information.
I’m glad juries didn’t want to convict reporters for doing what the culture of some newsrooms demanded of them. But I guess we all feel uneasy at the sight of our sources going to jail because we paid them while the managements which sanctioned the cash denied all knowledge.
I know some colleagues defend the right to pay people, including public servants, for stories. I wonder whether we shouldn’t be having a wider and franker discussion about that now.
Unrelated to Leveson, but worrying in its own way, is the mood to rewrite the rules on freedom of information.
And the greatest scandal of all is the use of surveillance powers to discover journalistic sources, which is all of a piece with what Edward Snowden was trying to draw to the world’s attention.
Quietly, and at the stroke of a Whitehall pen, the government decided it had no obligation to respect a privilege that had been tacitly acknowledged for more than a century and that everyone in this room knows is essential to worthwhile, revelatory journalism.
Nor is it just journalists who should be worried. Virtually unnoticed or even written about at the time, the Home Office decided to codify its position that communications data was not subject to any form of professional privilege.
A bland sentence tucked into a consultation document confirmed a situation whereby contacts between lawyers and clients; doctors and patients, MPs and constituents; priests and parishioners could be monitored so long as the fact was recorded and “special consideration” was applied.
It was only when – accidentally – it transpired that two Fleet Street reporters had had their phone records searched in order to uncover their contacts that our industry pushed back and managed to get a form of concession out of the government.
That was good. But what of the broader erosion of our civil liberties revealed by Snowden and evidenced by this home office paragraph?
Is the best we can manage a collective shrug?
Never mind that courts in American and Europe ruled that some of what Snowden had revealed was either unconstitutional and/or illegal; that the US congress re-wrote the rules of surveillance after discovering what was going on; or that the world’s largest tech companies scrambled to secure our communications after learning how they had been compromised without their knowledge or any informed debate.
That caused headlines around the world. Here, a bit of a shrug. One distinguished former editor wrote that if the security services said a journalist shouldn’t publish something, who was he to argue?
Had it really come to that? The confidence that we had – as an estate, independent of all other estates for two hundred years or more – evaporating in front of our eyes?
Let’s re-run that: if the state doesn’t want you to write something then we have no place to argue?
Would the Pentagon Papers ever have been published under such a doctrine? The Crossman Diaries? The Sunday Times’s work on Philby? The routine interception of communications exposed by Chapman Pincher? Spycatcher? Revelations about illegal rendition and torture?
If the government of the day says no, we meekly obey?
It’s not that we don’t sometimes rebut some of these perceived threats – and all credit to Bob’s vigilance at the Society of Editors and to Dominic Ponsford’s vigorous Save Our Sources campaign. There are howls of outrage if an editor can’t reveal the truth about an misbehaving footballer – even if no one actually turns up in court to argue the public interest case.
But where’s the confident, consistent view of our independent role in society – as an estate independent of government; capable of making our own judgments about what we think is truly in the public’s interest to know? And aren’t we there as the guardians of everyone’s civil liberties, not just selective causes of our own?
Occasionally during this period bewildered journalists, academics or free speech organisations would troop through London trying to make sense of what was happening in Britain.
Several of us did our best to find a simple way of explaining the solution that the best minds in Fleet Street and Westminster had devised. I personally never managed it in less than five minutes.
“Well everyone was worried that one former pornographer who owned one paper, might not join a new regulator. And everyone was against having any statutory way of enforcing regulation. So it had to be voluntary, but with legal carrots and sticks to persuade people like the former pornographer to join.”
Earnest visiting delegations would write this all down.
“Only the legal carrots and sticks had to have some legal basis. But obviously not through a law, because no one wanted that except the politicians, and they would, wouldn’t they? So they came up with the bright idea of a Royal Charter. ‘What’s a Royal Charter?’ Well it’s something that is administered by the Privy Council – we’ll come back to that in a minute, but think of it as the government of the day – and which was established for the cutlers, grocers and brewers in the 15th century and now includes such bodies as the Chartered Institute of Waste Management.”
Now, would you like another glass of wine?
“So the charter is there to give legal force – but not, obviously using a law, just a kind of royal law, but actually in the hands of the government because the Queen does not actually make laws – to the recognition body (I’ll explain that in a minute) which could approve the regulator, assuming there ever was a regulator which wanted to be recognised. And the press first of all wrote its own Royal Charter and then set up a body which didn’t want to be recognised. And there are now two regulators, one of which might yet be recognised but has no-one to regulate. But if it did find someone to regulate that would have a huge impact on the regulator which isn’t recognised and whose Chairman has said he doesn’t consider sufficiently independent. Are you with me?”
Sometimes – by this stage – it felt as though the stuffing had been completely knocked out of us. Never mind swagger, we had lost all confidence in having a reasoned conversation with anyone about the issues we faced.
Earnest academics who offered to help us think through the problem were repelled as press-hating interferers. We became convinced that 300 years of press freedom in this country were about to be brought to an end by a charmingly raffish character actor.
Eleven whole pages of a single edition of one national paper – count them! – were devoted to trying to prove that a decent, mild-mannered former FT executive, one of Lord Leveson’s assessors, was in fact a sinister Svengali figure hell bent on destroying all the liberties for which our forefathers had died. That was the strangest single issue of any newspaper I think I can remember.
The assault on the hapless David Bell was symptomatic of how some of the press had decided to play the post-Leveson period. This was not a debate – one in which it was possible, or even desirable, to engage with a number of different people and organisations who were, mainly, trying to arrive at a reasonable solution. It was a form of war. You were with us or you were against us. The normal rules of journalism were suspended.
And it didn’t stop with Leveson. While were at it – in this mood of fragile un-confidence – there came new orthodoxies and villains: the Human Rights Act along with the Europe convention and European courts all had to go. And then there were the west coast digital giants and the BBC.
The Human Rights Act came into the cross hairs because it has a clause, article 8, based on the European Convention, protecting privacy. Never mind the balancing arguments that Article 10 is the nearest we get to a US-style first amendment in this country. Or the protection it gave Harry Evans on Thalidomide. Or how it stopped William Goodwin from going to jail for refusing to reveal his sources. It was a simple case of hating eight. Not a discussion in which reasonable people might have different views. It was war.
And it was war on anything invented in California or Seattle. Some of which I’m totally up for – particularly anything that smells of unfair competition or gaining a commercial advantage through artificial tax planning. But much of what they’re doing is – journalistically – rather fascinating and crucial for us to understand, if not harness.
And, of course the BBC must be slashed because it’s destroying the national press, or so I read. You might argue, if you were picky, that the American press is as deeply challenged as the British press – and they have nothing resembling the BBC to explain their decline. So blaming all our ills and anxieties on the presence of a public broadcaster may or may not be justified. You could close down the BBC entirely and still not discover the silver bullet for newspapers.
But that doesn’t stop the BBC being treated to a daily monstering that feels at times disproportionate and obsessive – never mind the multiple undeclared conflicts of interest.
I certainly feel conflicted when I think about the BBC.
As an editor, many things about the BBC did irritate and annoy me. They had no business dabbling in some of their commercial ventures. The fact that they were essentially “free” (once the licence fee had been paid) is, I can see, a complication if you’re trying to build a subscription model.
The organization is quite often extremely bad at partnerships and collaboration. It can be slow moving, intransigent and arrogant. More concerning still, I sometimes worry about its dominance, influence and journalistic bravery.
So I don’t need convincing about the troubling aspects of the BBC. But – both as a journalist and as a citizen, I can’t ignore its immense virtues strengths. Nor would I want to.
In thinking about the BBC, I also see probably the greatest news organisation in the world. A newsroom of incomparable depth, range, talent and knowledge. Journalists of seriousness, huge professionalism and the highest ethical standards.
One of the few news organisations in the world still dedicated to being based out in the world telling stories globally because so many of the stories that affect our lives today are global.
So, as well as being very suspicious of the BBC I’m incredibly grateful for, and proud of, and trusting in, the BBC.
Does no one else feel this?
It doesn’t feel like it from the compulsively negative coverage we serve up almost daily. And, in a sense, the more the national press behaves like a journalistic battering ram on the subject the more I feel a need for the BBC.
Of course, there’s no requirement for the press to deal with anyone fairly, impartially or in a balanced way – and, quite often, Fleet Street, relishes the freedom to be as aggressive and biased as it likes. That’s as it should be. But when Fleet Street is in fully cry you don’t half appreciate the BBC’s still small voice of calm.
I wouldn’t want the BBC without Fleet Street. But nor would I want Fleet Street without a strong BBC.
Ironically, the licence fee is currently the only provably successful business model for delivering extremely high quality general news internationally and nationally.
There may be reasons why it’s not ultimately sustainable. If so, surely there’s all the more reason to hold a reasonable discussion about the best way to keep BBC journalism proud, independent, strong… and confident.
In whose interests – apart from politicians and other centres of power which deserve to be scrutinized – is it to have a cowed BBC? I’m actually amazed it’s not more cowed. Imagine if, on a newspaper, a mistake of the sort that most of us make in our careers led to a full-scale judicial inquiry. The editor and chairman sacked. A thousand headlines, millions of pounds in costs.
If any newspaper survived such attention at all the subsequent culture would surely be one of extreme back covering and caution. That would be only human.
It’s something of a miracle that the BBC, under such scrutiny and attack on a continuous basis, is still capable of producing robust, independent journalism. I would sometimes like it to be still more brave and still more independent – but that’s another story.
The second bit of the confidence issue is to do with our readers. Or – to be completely comprehensive – our users and viewers and browsers and listeners. But let’s call them readers tonight.
The longer I edited the more I began to think that – in the swirl of the revolution gripping our trade – we had not really had time to pause and think how that relationship – between us and them – had changed.
One or two early digital academics – yes, those hated academic again – began theorising about this transformed relationship 10 or more years ago. “The wisdom of crowds”… “Our readers know more than we do”… “Here Comes everyone” …”We the Media” … and so on.
I’m not sure many journalists over a certain age believed it. The old model was a comfortable one: we knew more than you did. We had the megaphone, you didn’t. You paid us to find things out. The advertisers paid us to reach you. What was not to like?
But almost everything about that has changed. Not totally, but immensely.
We’re now not the only people who know stuff. Quite often – some might argue, mostly – the people out there are ahead of us in finding things out and in distributing news about them. Increasingly, the most dramatic pieces of news footage are coming from people’s mobile phones. If Peterloo happened today there would be a hundred clips on Twitter or YouTube within hours. Which, in itself, might stop a the massacre of innocent people. The power of bearing witness.
We know the outlines of this revolution as our readers are experiencing it: how billions of people behave on social media: how they share, discuss, distribute, and contribute.
But too many of us think those new forms of behaviour don’t apply in our world because what we do is different …and (some add) the more different and separate we can keep it the better.
That feels to me like a strategy driven by fear, not confidence in what we do.
How should our relationship change?
Let me give four examples of things that would have been unthinkable a decade ago, but might seem interesting pointers.
1) Glenn Greenwald got the biggest scoop of the decade – and a Pulitzer Prize to boot – despite not being a “proper journalist”
Proper journalists write stories, press the send button and go off to the pub. The next day they start a new story, and do the same. When they write “ends” at the end of the story they mean it.
Glenn was different. He really did believe that many of his readers knew more than he did. He could tell them things – and vice versa. The most interesting moment in the day for him was when he pressed the send button. The end wasn’t the end: it was the beginning.
So Glenn would go off, make himself a cup of tea and then return to talk to his readers. When you think about it, he was doing the obvious thing. The moment when a story hits the fresh air is the moment of greatest interest. How will people respond and react? Who will challenge it, who can add to it or clarify it? Did we get anything wrong? Where are the witnesses out there, who are the experts who can fill in angles we might have missed? Once it’s out there, it couldn’t be more interesting.
And journalistically valuable. Because if our aim is to give the best possible account of the world then we should – surely – be deeply interested in people who can tell us how close we got to the truth … and in how to take the story forward.
It turned out one of Glenn’s readers knew infinitely more about the subject than Glenn could ever hope to know. Edward Snowden could have gone to any major news organisation in the world: he chose to go to a blogger on the Guardian who couldn’t get a byline in the New York Times because he wasn’t a “proper” reporter.
His newsroom was the kitchen table on the edge of the Brazilian jungle, a house he shared with 13 rescue dogs. If that’s not a metaphor for the shifting shape of modern information I don’t know what is.
The idea that a story begins at the very point when it used to end is – some might still think – an extremely radical one. It would, if we followed it through, disrupt most of our assumptions about news and how we do it. Never mind the mundane task of drawing up rotas. But if it leads to something that’s better, journalistically, and a readership which feels more engaged – and, I would argue, trusting – isn’t it one important pointer to the future?
2) Joris Luyendijk is a Dutch anthropologist and journalist who somehow ended up as a war correspondent in the Middle East. He returned to the Netherlands to write a column about the subject he thought to be one of the most important of our times: the electric car. Joris was not the only person to believe that if China and India acquire the petrol and diesel car-buying habits of the west, then the resulting emissions mean we’re all in deep trouble.
But this was a column with a difference. As he admitted in his very first column, he knew nothing at all about the subject. Zero. He just thought it was interesting and important.
Now, lots of journalists know very little about the things they are asked to write about. But very few of them admit it. Indeed, they would consider the skill of a journalist lies in the skill with which they can persuade a reader that they are deeply knowledgeable, if not expert.
But Joris was on a journey of exploration. He asked his readers what they considered most important. The column immediately attracted numerous people working in the field of alternative: they truly were experts. They helped with his research and guided the direction of his journey. They even funded a prize he offered at one stage, and paid to join the jury to determine the winner.
I liked the idea so much when I met him that I hired him to write another column on a subject about which he knew nothing – banking. For two years he persuaded bankers of all shapes and sizes to open their hearts to him in a way traditional journalism rarely manages. The column’s just been turned into a book and has so far sold 250k copies in the Dutch edition alone.
Joris’s story is about the power of being open. Of not pretending to be the all-seeing, all-knowing eye. Of confessing the vulnerability and imperfection of what we do. Of finding a more tentative, collaborative and inquiring tone of voice. And of enlisting the readers’ help rather than asking them to remain in the distance as passive recipients of our work.
3) From bankers to teachers. It was important to us, editorially and commercially, that we kept a good number of teachers as readers of the Guardian even after the printed supplement we used to publish weekly suffered from the same fate as most newspaper advertising: a case of drastic slimming.
A group of journalists sat down and started planning an educational website that would keep teachers coming to the Guardian. They would write these stories and those stories and cover this issue and that issue.
Then someone had a bright idea: why don’t we ask the teachers what they want? We did. It turned out their ask was for something different: can we have a space where we can upload and share our lesson plans?
Really? We replied. Because what we do is write stories. Surely you want stories?
No, they insisted, we live hectic lives and the most useful thing you can do for us is to give us a place where we can collaborate on and share, our teaching resources.
So we built that space. There are now thousands and thousands of lesson plans, presentations and videos from Jane Austen through to quantum physics. The site has 300,000 registered members. There are 100k twitter followers and the community has been growing at 35 per cent a year in the UK – with expansion In Australia and the US, nearly double that rate.
Revenues from people who want to reach that audience of teachers are also growing, with a healthy double-digit profit margin. The opposite from the normal story of commercial gloom.
Of course, we give them stories as well. But we would never have arrived at the main driver of growth and usage without entering into an open conversation about how we could be most useful to the people we wanted to serve.
4) The final example is the recent climate change campaign we ran. I had an uneasy feeling, as I contemplated stepping down from the editorship, that my one post-editing regret might be not having done justice to arguably the biggest story of our times – climate change.
I would actually spread that more widely and say that journalism as a whole has struggled to report adequately on a subject which – if the world’s scientists are only have correct – could, within a generation or so, dwarf every other issue any of us covers, if only because it will challenge virtually every other faced of life.
Journalism is a great rear view mirror: it sometimes lacks the tools to deal with probabilities on things that might happen 10 or 20 years in the future.
We had done well enough on the environment – a great team of editors and reports, backed by an open network of other experts who were delighted to post on our site because of the global impact it gave them. And we were happy to have them because they were, well, experts. Everybody won.
But had we really – any of us – broken through with something that made people sit up and take the issue seriously? The team we assembled included reporters and specialists and web developers. But also three people with a background or interest in digital activism – that is, in talking to people and mobilising support.
Within five months we had got nearly quarter of a million people signed up in support. But then the activist members of the team, Amanda, Nabeelah and Emma, went further, involving the readers and signatories in making their own film and in writing personal letters to the eminent people we were trying to influence.
These forms of communication were highly effective – authentic in a way we could, as journalists never quite manage – and, I hope, made the readers feel part of something rather than people simply feeling hopelessly fatalistic about climate.
What began as a left field campaign was praised by the Prince of Wales, the UN secretary general and the keep people spearheading the forthcoming Paris climate change talks. More remarkable, the campaign’s key arguments were effectively endorsed this month by the governor of the Bank of England.
So there are four examples of confidently changing the relationship with readers in ways, which wouldn’t have been imaginable until a decade ago.
A reporter who engages with readers just as most reporters are going home. A columnist who harnesses the power of his readers to steer his examination of a complex subject. A network of readers who tell a newspaper what they want – which turns out to be something no journalist would have imagined. A trio of activists who conjure up ways of involving readers in a campaign in a way which simply wouldn’t have come out of a conventional newsroom.
Of course the readers can sometimes be a disappointment. I’m well over being starry eyed about the quality of all comment threads. But mostly Guardian readers are incredibly loyal to the paper and love the idea of being a more involved part of it.
That’s why the Guardian’s piloting a membership scheme. Not a loyalty scheme, with vouchers for West End shows and 10 per cent off your next case of wine. But something, which will extend our journalism into live discussions and events and will allow the voices to readers to be heard in a physical space as well as on the printed page and the comment threads. Real members.
I remember the event we held after the shock of the Charlie Hebdo murders. We organised a debate within 24 hours. We sold out within minutes. Our readers were desperate to gather and discuss what had happened, its meaning, what might happen next. We had no idea who would come or what they would say. But we had confidence in our journalism and in them. It was a moving, informative deeply rewarding evening.
This idea of extending what we do into live events – and then feeding those live events back into content for our websites may be a relatively new one for our own business. The music industry got there sometime before us.
Of course, it requires us to be confident in what we do. To have confidence in the intelligence of our readers. The confidence to behave openly, to be excited about the future, not simply fearful. The confidence not to be locked in the bunker mentality of us against them. Us with them seems to me a much more powerful way to think about the future.
Depressingly, the opposite is quite common. You could boil down some experiments in reader engagement to one sentence “I don’t bother reading the comment threads because they’re really stupid.”
It’s the world of the club who can only see the world of the mob.
Google, Twitter, Facebook, Apple, Spotify, Amazon and Reddit didn’t get where they are today by thinking their users were stupid. If particular sites or features weren’t working they tried to work out why and what to do about it.
The people who work in Palo Alto, Seattle or Mountain View understand how the digital revolution of the past decade is about much more than technologies. As in the15th C it is about dramatically shifting rearrangements of power and democracy.
Put books into the hands of many, not a small elite, and you have not simply given the typesetters the killer advantage over the scribes. You have changed the fundamentals of society,
Allow virtually everyone the ability to express an opinion, report, photograph, distribute, publish and share and you have fundamentally changed the world for ever.
The unconfident reaction to that is to curse the companies which are bringing about this change and to turn our backs on the results or to separate ourselves off from it.
“That may be what they do, but what we do is different.”
The confident response is surely to revel in the mind-boggling possibilities what this means for informed democracies. That’s why newspapers came into being. To give our readers the best possible information so that they could make the best possible decisions about their own lives and about broader society.
Now – in the last decade – people are taking advantage of new technologies to create extraordinary new flows and pathways of information.
Some of what is being generated and shared is pointless or malign.
But much of it is recognizably similar to what we do. And if I came to believe anything in the last 10 years at the Guardian is was that we would be better off embracing and harnessing that spirit and energy rather than turning our backs on it.
I arrived at that conviction not because I didn’t believe in journalism. If anything, I believed more and more fervently in the necessity of what we do. I think of good journalists as being as essential to healthy societies as the police or clean water. We can see all around us in the world today what happens when journalism is suppressed and reporters persecuted.
But let’s have confidence in what we do. Let’s root our journalism in a common idea and tradition of genuine public interest. Let’s be open to our readers and to evolving technologies. Let’s harness the tectonic movements around us, not be fearful of them.
Let’s get our confidence back.