Alan Rusbridger

Alan Rusbridger
Alan Rusbridger in 2007
Born	(1953-12-29) 29 December 1953 Northern Rhodesia (present-day Zambia)
Occupation	Editor
Notable credit(s)	Editor of The Guardian Deputy Editor of The Guardian
Salary	£455,000 (total remuneration)
Children	2 daughters

Alan Charles Rusbridger (born 29 December 1953) is the editor of The Guardian, a British newspaper. He took up the post in 1995, having been a reporter and columnist earlier in his career.

Life and career

Before 1995

Rusbridger was born in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia), the son of B.E. (née Wickham) and G.H. Rusbridger, the Director of Education of Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia). He was educated at Cranleigh School, a boys' independent school in Cranleigh, Surrey, and at Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he read English. During this period he worked on the Surrey Advertiser outside term time.

Rusbridger's first regular job in journalism was with the Cambridge Evening News. He joined The Guardian as a reporter in 1979 and subsequently wrote the paper's diary column and was a feature writer. He left to become The Observer's TV critic before moving to America to be the Washington editor of the London Daily News in 1987. In November 1985, Ruisbridger had a brief period as a Royal reporter following the Prince and Princess of Wales around Melbourne, Australia. Fascinated by gadgets, at this stage he was already using a Tandy word processor and an early (slow) modem to file stories back to London.

After returning to The Guardian, he launched the "Weekend" supplement in 1988, followed by the paper's "G2" section. He became features editor in 1994.

After 1995

As editor from 1995, he defended the paper against a number of high-profile defamation suits, including those from the Police Federation and the Conservative MPs, Neil Hamilton and Jonathan Aitken. In the case involving Hamilton, and the lobbyist Ian Greer, he said: They weren’t going to fight us in the court so they tried to do it through the TV studio." Rusbridger countered them by being available for TV interviews over three days to ensure that their version of events did not gain precedence. Hamilton's case collapsed shortly before a court hearing, while Aitken was demonstrated to have perjured himself, and served a prison sentence as a result.

Seen early in his editorship as a modernising new broom, he commented in June 1997 shortly after the election of Tony Blair's first New Labour government that the 'old' Guardian: "opposed lots of things the Tories did which we'd now think weren't terribly bad in retrospect ... I mean, a lot of the trade union stuff doesn't seem as horrendous now as it seemed at the time." From around 1997, he oversaw the launch and development of the newspaper's website, initially known as Guardian Unlimited.

In September 2005 The Guardian responded to the tabloid re-launches of The Times and The Independent by moving from a broadsheet format to the "Berliner" format, which is common in the rest of Europe. The print edition of the newspaper still accounted for about 75% of the company's revenue around 2012. In a profile of Rusbridger though, published in the New Statesman at the end of May 2012, former newspaper editor Peter Wilby cast doubt on whether Rusbridger's enthusiasm for online journalism, freely available without a paywall, and the large amount of money invested by the group, would ever gain a return or ensure the long-term survival of the newspaper.

He is a member of the board of Guardian News and Media, of the main board of the Guardian Media Group and of the Scott Trust, which owns The Guardian and The Observer, of which he is executive editor. Rusbridger received £471,000 in pay and benefits in 2008/9.

He has written three children's books as well as being the co-author (with Ronan Bennett) of a BBC drama, Fields of Gold.

Other activities

He is visiting Fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford, and Visiting Professor of History at Queen Mary, University of London. Since 2004 he has been Chairman of the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain. He is a governor of the Ditchley Foundation, an organisation which exists to promote international relations.

Rusbridger supports 10:10, a British climate change campaign for a 10% reduction in carbon emissions in 2010.

Personal life and honours

In 1982, he married the educationalist Lindsay Mackie, who was educated at the private St Leonards School, in St Andrews, Fife. She helped found FILMCLUB. They have two daughters (born 1983 and May 1986), one of whom was briefly educated at the independent St Paul's Girls' School in London. In 2009 it was reported that one of his daughters, Isabella, had been working at The Guardian, but had been using her mother's surname as a nom de plume to avoid suspicion of having obtained the job through nepotism. His wife is good friends with Tessa Jowell, whom she knew at the University of Edinburgh, and he is good friends with her estranged husband, David Mills. They both own cottages near the same Gloucestershire village. He is Chairman of the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain.

Rusbridger received an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from the University of Lincoln in September 2009 and from the University of Kingston in January 2010.

In 2010 he was chosen to deliver the annual Andrew Olle Media Lecture in Australia.

Bibliography

• The Guardian Year (1994) edited by Alan Rusbridger ISBN 1-85702-265-3
• The Coldest Day in the Zoo (2004) ISBN 0-14-131745-0
• The Wildest Day at the Zoo (2005) ISBN 0-14-131933-X
• The Smelliest Day at the Zoo (2007) ISBN 0-14-132068-0
• Play It Again: Why Amateurs Should Attempt the Impossible (2012) ISBN 0224093770

External links

• Profile and column archive at The Guardian
• Alan Rusbridger on Twitter
• Article archive at Journalisted
• Appearances on C-SPAN
• Alan Rusbridger on Charlie Rose

• Works by or about Alan Rusbridger in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Alan Rusbridger at the Notable Names Database
• Alan Rusbridger at Puffin Books

Articles

• Embracing Change, Frances Stead Sellers, American Journalism Review, October–November 2006
• What happened when the Guardian editor met Piers Morgan, The Independent, 2 April 2007
• Ombudsmen in the digital future, Alan Rusbridger, Organization of News Ombudsmen, 21 May 2007
• A Chill on 'The Guardian', Alan Rusbridger, The New York Review of Books, 15 January 2009
• The Ben Bradlee of Phone Hacking , Dylan Byers, Adweek, 14 July 2011

Media offices
Preceded by Jonathan Fenby	Deputy Editor of The Guardian 1993 - 1995	Succeeded by Georgina Henry
Preceded by Peter Preston	Editor of The Guardian 1995–present	Incumbent