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Alan Rusbridger, Ex-Guardian Editor, Won’t Become Chairman of Its Owner Alan Rusbridger, Ex-Editor of Guardian, Won’t Become Chairman of Its Owner
(about 5 hours later)
LONDON — Alan Rusbridger, the former editor of The Guardian, said on Friday that he would not move up to be chairman of the Scott Trust, the nonprofit body that owns the left-leaning news organization. LONDON — When Alan Rusbridger retired last year after two decades as the editor of The Guardian, he was lauded as one of the finest journalists of his generation, having transformed a midsize British newspaper into an international digital media giant with a growing audience. He racked up a string of investigative scoops and made the organization a darling of left-leaning readers around the English-speaking world.
The announcement by Mr. Rusbridger — whose 20 years at the helm of The Guardian were marked by an aggressive expansion overseas as well as its first Pulitzer Prize, which it shared with The Washington Post in 2014 — comes with the organization facing extensive cost cutting as it looks to reduce its $380 million in annualized expenditure. But on Friday, Mr. Rusbridger departed the organization to which he had devoted his career. After disclosures about mounting financial losses that threatened The Guardian’s very continuity, he lost favor, and now he is stepping aside from the plum role he was set to assume in September, as chairman of the Scott Trust, the nonprofit organization that owns The Guardian.
The group said in its annual report for 2015 that its operating losses were 45.3 million pounds, or about $65 million. The Guardian Media Group, which is supported by the Scott Trust, said in January that it intended to trim its costs by 20 percent in three years, in part by cutting jobs. Mr. Rusbridger’s decision to cut ties with the Guardian follows a series of events that made his presence seem increasingly untenable: lingering resentments from a bitter battle over his replacement as editor; a string of articles, possibly fueled by internal leaks, detailing the paper’s deteriorating finances; and, finally, a clash with his successor, Katharine Viner, who helped spearhead his international growth strategy but now faces a period of retrenchment.
“The economic climate facing all newspapers has changed drastically in the last 12 months,” Mr. Rusbridger said in a statement released by the Scott Trust. “It’s obvious that new business models will have to be created, and I can understand why a new team would want a new chair. I send my former colleagues every possible good wish for the future.” “Much has changed in the year since I stepped down,” Mr. Rusbridger wrote in a memo to The Guardian’s staff on Friday, stating that the leadership of The Guardian — David Pemsel, the chief executive of the Guardian Media Group, and Ms. Viner, the editor — no longer wanted him to take over the Scott Trust. Mr. Rusbridger said he would also leave the board of the trust.
In the statement, the Scott Trust said that it had “reluctantly accepted his decision” and that Liz Forgan, the current chairwoman, would stay in place until a successor was chosen. In a statement, the Scott Trust said that it had “reluctantly accepted his decision, although it was its unanimous hope that he would stay on the board.”
“Alan Rusbridger’s contribution to The Guardian over 20 years as editor in chief is immeasurable,” Ms. Forgan said. “He has been the creative leader of this place and an inspiration to generations of journalists. His decision reflects his enormous integrity and his dedication to the Guardian.” Mr. Rusbridger seemed to imply at times that he had been undone by the new regime — one he helped put in place — as well as a rapidly shifting media environment in which even forward-thinking news organizations are hemorrhaging money as titans like Facebook and Google devour advertising revenue.
Mr. Rusbridger was to become chairman of the Scott Trust this fall under an agreement reached in 2014 when he announced that he would step down as The Guardian’s editor. “We all currently do our journalism in the teeth of a force-12 digital hurricane,” Mr. Rusbridger said in his letter. The leadership of The Guardian clearly believe they would like to plot a route into the future with a new chair,” he said, adding, “I understand their reasoning.”
While editor, Mr. Rusbridger, 62, oversaw an aggressive international expansion of its news gathering operations that began in 2011, with the goal of cultivating a global readership online. The Scott Trust invested heavily in English-language markets overseas, recruiting dozens of journalists in New York and Sydney, Australia, to bolster coverage outside its home market. The Guardian lost $65 million in 2015. It is seeking to cut its annual budget of $380 million by 20 percent over the next three years. It is cutting its British work force by 310 positions — 250 job cuts and 60 vacant positions that will not be filled — or 18 percent of the total.
Those investments coincided with the acclaim garnered by The Guardian’s leading role in coverage of WikiLeaks and Edward J. Snowden’s revelations about extensive, warrantless spying on ordinary citizens by American and British intelligence services. It shared a Pulitzer Prize with The Washington Post for its reporting on that issue. A central point of disagreement within The Guardian has been its refusal — for Mr. Rusbridger, virtually an ideology — to charge online subscribers, as news organizations like The Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times have all come around to doing. The Guardian has recently experimented with a membership model that amounts to seeking donations, but Mr. Rusbridger insisted that a digital pay wall would be at odds with the newspaper’s editorial philosophy.
But while The Guardian succeeded in significantly growing its international readership — the company says traffic from outside Britain now represents two-thirds of its total digital audience — its resistance to charging readers for its content has come at a significant cost, particularly at a time when revenues from digital advertising have been falling precipitously across the media industry. Under Mr. Rusbridger, the Guardian invested hundreds of millions of dollars in its expansion strategy, fueled in part by proceeds from the sale of a trade publication, Auto Trader. The Guardian Media Group’s investment fund, while sizable, is not infinite and had been shrinking recently at an alarming rate — to 740 million pounds ($1.07 billion) in January, from £838.3 million in July.
Mr. Rusbridger was succeeded as editor of The Guardian by Katharine Viner last summer. Since then, he has been the principal, or head, of Lady Margaret Hall, a college at Oxford University. The Guardian, which started in Manchester, England, in 1821, built a presence in Australia and the United States beginning in 2011. It seemed to move easily into the digital realm, staffing 10 bureaus in the two countries and hiring more than 50 reporters.
Along the way, Mr. Rusbridger racked up an investigative hat trick, with electrifying scoops on illegal phone hacking by British tabloids, the WikiLeaks trove of diplomatic cables and leaks from Edward J. Snowden describing the vast electronic surveillance conducted by the National Security Agency. The Guardian won its first Pulitzer Prize in 2014, shared with The Washington Post, for the surveillance articles.
But while The Guardian succeeded in significantly expanding its international readership — the company says traffic from outside Britain now represents two-thirds of its digital audience — its resistance to charging readers for content came at a significant cost, and Mr. Rusbridger’s vision of a premier global newsroom with far-flung bureaus collided with the reality of a print business struggling just to tread water in a digital world.
“He made the Guardian’s mark, and made it an international brand,” said Dominic Ponsford, the editor of Press Gazette, which covers the British news industry. But it was an expensive proposition, and “that cost is one of the reasons that its losses are so high now,” said Mr. Ponsford.
In the statement, the Scott Trust said Liz Forgan, the current chairwoman, would stay in place until a successor was chosen.
Mr. Rusbridger was to become chairman of the Scott Trust under an agreement reached in 2014, when he announced that he would step down as editor. It was an awkward arrangement by some accounts, because Mr. Rusbridger would effectively be overseeing Ms. Viner, his successor.
In a statement on Friday, Ms. Viner lauded Mr. Rusbridger as “a truly towering figure at The Guardian over the last three decades.” But she added: “In his email to staff, Alan recognized how much has changed in the year since he stepped down as editor, and that it is right that we all plot a new route to the future. We face a formidable challenge over the coming months in a digital environment that is shifting all the time: we need to deliver a new strategy and cut costs while maintaining our exceptionally high standard of journalism.”
Current and former colleagues of Mr. Rusbridger, who acknowledged criticism of his business decisions, characterized him as a brilliant journalist — not to mention a talented pianist, an affinity he explored in a 2013 book — and nearly universally declined to discuss his departure, describing it as a sad way to end his affiliation with the institution.
And even when they were critical of some of his business decisions, including the relentless expansion and the insistence on avoiding pay walls for The Guardian’s website, they conceded that the decisions were not without justification.
Mr. Rusbridger, who was born in Zambia and graduated from the University of Cambridge in 1976 with a degree in English, started as a journalist at The Cambridge Evening News. He joined The Guardian in 1979, and in 1988 became an editor at the newspaper.
In 1994, he was promoted to deputy editor of The Guardian, before taking over the next year as editor in chief, a position he held until his departure last summer. He is currently principal, or head, of Lady Margaret Hall, a college at Oxford University, and in September he will become the chairman of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, also at Oxford.