The former Guardian editor offers a compelling tour of journalism and why it matters
My initiation in the mid-1980s was anything but propitious: “Boy: your piece is full of shit,” an editor at the Reuters news agency bellowed at me in the middle of the busy newsroom. The rough and tumble is one of the endearing, and enduring, qualities of news journalism, even if so much else about it (not least the management skills) has changed. As Alan Rusbridger points out in his captivating guide, the trade has weathered its many storms. It’s still there, just; and it is vital for society that it survives and even thrives again.
The former Guardian editor is one of the gatekeepers of the industry. When in that post and in subsequent speeches and books he has pondered its future in the face of
fake news and the financial collapse of its business model. His latest offering, an A to Z guide, does all this too, while also injecting humour. As he notes early on, “boredom is the editorial kiss of death”. Story selection is crucial for a successful editor with an eye on circulation, or nowadays clicks. In local papers or TV-land, that has meant: “If it bleeds, it leads.” The more dramatic – gruesome even – the story, the better. Or as US presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson is supposed to have said: “Newspaper editors are men who separate the wheat from the chaff, and then they print the chaff.”