How The Guardian unleashed a monster Alan Rusbridger created 'open journalism' — but doesn't seem to grasp what it has become

Some of it was silly (a page allowing readers to generate messages of praise for then-security columnist Glenn Greenwald was so embarrassingly sycophantic that it seems to have been quietly shuffled off the Guardian website). Some of it was admirable — Comment is Free gave professional inroads to a lot of writers who might otherwise have been left on the outside of political journalism, and as I was one of them, I can’t be too churlish about its faults.

Some of it was probably damaging. A below-the-line breakdown from 2012 revealed that at least a fifth of the Guardian’s comments were made by 0.0037% of the actual audience. By any reckoning, that’s not a representative segment of the readership — yet comments took on outsize importance for editors, with writers expected to “jump on the thread” and defend their work. But it all helped to form what journalism would be in the era of the internet: though there’s been some movement away from comments, with readers and writers slugging it out on Twitter instead, it’s still the default for news sites (including this one) to offer instant right-of-reply. Rusbridger’s Guardian helped shape that default.

More significantly, it helped shape the expectation that news would be free. Paywalls are the opposite of open journalism, and the Guardian’s business model remains one of voluntary contributions. For Rusbridger, there’s a political imperative to this: democracies depend on having “informed citizens”, he writes. But there’s a counterargument that’s worth considering, even if it might seem a bit hypocritical to put it forward on a free-to-read site as UnHerd is for the time being (though there are plans to charge in the future). A public that is used to getting all its news for nothing has no reason to value journalism, no price to put on the truth. How does the naïve reader clock that a crank website like Exaro (now-defunct promotor of false sexual abuse claims) is worth less than heavyweight investigative journalism that is equally free to read?

In theory, News and How to Use It should be the perfect primer for such audiences. But as Rusbridger notes in the introduction, “journalism has, it seems to me, always struggled to describe itself honestly, if at all” — and this book is not entirely an exception. Reading its A-to-Z entries, there’s little clue that the author is an architect of the media as much as an observer. In an entry on “Gatekeeping”, he discusses the “Steele dossier” — the lurid oppo research on Trump that was leaked in 2017. “The New York Times (and several others) didn’t publish. Buzzfeed did. Who was right?” I don’t know, but I feel like Rusbridger should share his opinion on the matter. Or, at least, tell us what he would have done if it had happened on his watch.

Too often, he trails off into indecisive platitudes or empty exclamations: “time will tell”, “change will come… slowly”; something on one page “couldn’t matter more”, while something on the next page “couldn’t be more urgent”. Perhaps, ungenerously, this vagueness is because Rusbridger no longer has the answers. His references on theory of journalism are noughties-heavy. He debunks the “filter bubble” criticism of social media (what could be more of a filter bubble, he asks, than an old-style printed paper), but doesn’t mention the growing understanding that seeking out material you disagree with can actually heighten polarisation. (There’s a reason one of my most reliable Comment is Free pitch genres was “Daily Mail does awful thing”.)

Clay Shirky and Jeff Jarvis — two early cheerleaders for the internet who influenced the development of “open journalism” — both feature, but there’s no reckoning with how the last decade has tested their optimism. Shirky’s thesis in his 2008 book Here Comes Everybody was that the internet would democratise expertise with the demise of gatekeeping; Jarvis argued for “digital first” journalism supplemented by a high-quality print product. But gatekeeping feels less disposable once you’ve felt the effects of Covid conspiracies and QAnon; and Rusbridger’s beautiful Berliner-format Guardian was one of the first targets of his replacement, Kath Viner. Faced with the urgent challenge of making The Guardian not just innovative but sustainable, she binned the expensive presses in favour of standard tabloid size.

It’s inevitable that a book about journalism is vulnerable to be overtaken by events. Still, a reference to “Guardian columnist Suzanne Moore” is a particularly glaring casualty of deadlines. Last week, Moore quit the paper, where she has clearly been unhappy since at least March, when 338 of her colleagues across The Guardian and The Observer signed a letter denouncing “transphobic content” which clearly targeted her. Rusbridger mentions online abuse of Moore by the Right-winger James Delingpole; I’d be much more interested in reading what he has to say about her treatment by her peers, and the newsroom culture he left behind.

Rusbridger seems strangely insulated from the partisan strains on journalists: he still sees social media as a kind of ad-hoc ombudsman, resented only by those hacks who shrink from scrutiny (“No longer can the biters have immunity from being bitten back”). This will be bitterly hilarious to anyone who’s enjoyed the kind of “scrutiny” that comes in the form of death and rape threats. News and How to Use It is less a guidebook than a monument to a lost ideal. In the first decade of this century, Rusbridger was something like a prophet of news; his legacy, for good and bad, deserves a sharper eye than this book can bring to bear.

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Sarah Ditum is a columnist, critic and feature writer.

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