Warming up for key changes at the Guardian

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2014/dec/14/key-changes-guardian-alan-rusbridger

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Editing a newspaper can, over time, prove a draining journey. The people who work with you live out their lives – in sickness and health, hope and disappointment – on a stage inside or just outside your office. The news never stops. Nor does technical upheaval. You’re legally responsible, 24/7: financially responsible on a creaking bottom line, too. So, year after year, the paper comes to have a demanding existence of its own. It is your creation, exhilaration, defining challenge. Which is another way of saying that Alan Rusbridger, editor-in-chief of the Guardian and the Observer, clearing his desk next summer after two decades in charge, may sometimes feel utterly bereft.

Alan moves on to chair the controlling Scott Trust pavilioned in praise and prizes. Chalk Snowden, WikiLeaks and phone-hacking on his scoreboard. Count 111m unique visitors online around the world. Ponder who’ll follow America and Australia as busy hubs. Hear the editor of the Washington Post talking about Rusbridger’s “tremendous legacy”. Dust down his Pulitzer before you leave. But his stretching six months before handover is more than enough time for proper eulogies. Ladbrokes has opened a book on the Rusbridger succession already. Perhaps it’s time to get analysis under way.

For there are many things about the Guardian that make it different. One is its (slightly amended) trust ownership, which exists to keep the daily and, one step behind, its Sunday sister going; whether in print, online, or whirling in cyberspace. Another is its attachment to transparency and workplace democracy.

The two aren’t always a harmonious fit. Democracy means that some 40 years ago, when I became editor, the journalists’ union insisted on incorporating staff voices in the choice. They wanted a direct vote. The trust said no. They came back and sought an indicative vote to advise staff nominees on the sub-committee that would advise the whole trust who should succeed Alastair Hetherington. Um … Agreed!

Twenty years later, when Alan got the job, the vote was marginally more straightforward. But, essentially, we were still talking puffs of white smoke over the Vatican. And a certain degree of old-fashioned electioneering – or at least manifesto-writing – was there in the mix.

What does this mean for Ladbrokes? That really outside candidates won’t apply: unless they don’t have a current employer to offend. So look and think inside, up to and beyond the next general election. All will go well, as long as staff polls and trust inclinations coincide. But nobody knows what will happen if they don’t. And nobody, equally, can tell how the “traditional system” (ie the one used last time) will work in a digital era full of global ambitions.

How do new employees in Oz know who to choose? How do the swelling legions of American-based journalists with no London experience get to decide? Are the scores of programmers and designers on hustings watch too – or left at the door? Papal democracy (duly amended) arrives stuffed with online questions, morphing into a UN general assembly along the way.

There are instant frontrunners – Janine Gibson, head of online, and Kath Viner, her successor in New York: but the process remains oblique – in some contrast to the Scott Trust’s decision to ask Alan Rusbridger to take over from Liz Forgan when she ends her spell in the trust chair in 2016.

Why no quasi-democracy there, some inevitably ask. A Le Monde sort of question to which the answer is simple enough: the historic chaos that dogged journalist rule at Le Monde. The Guardian and Observer have no conventional proprietor. They need to be consensual and a touch elliptical as they go about their business. Nobody, perhaps, should be quite sure who’s in charge: the trust, the editor, the CEO, the board? Constructive uncertainty rules, sort of OK? It’s an ad hoc formula that makes compromise vital. Which doesn’t mean that upheavals don’t happen. Look back and you find CEOs departing overnight, merger plots foiled, trust and board tangles, spasms of tension. You can also, many times, find the hard grind of financial necessity settling scores.

It isn’t axiomatic that such constraints will still operate in an era of relative security with enough cash banked to see out many years of crisis – and there are plenty of sticky issues to be resolved. Take just a couple of quotes from the last few months. One from Aron Pilhofer, the new executive editor for digital hired from the New York Times. Most newspapers “have not made the full shift to digital, and neither has the Guardian. That’s what we’re focusing on right now. The danger is that print revenue isn’t just going to decline gradually. Never [in history] has that ever happened, revenue just tailing off to zero.”

Quote two comes from Andrew Miller, the Guardian’s chief executive. “Some newspapers are on life support, others are in intensive care”, he told an LSE audience. “But … I’m glad to say we’re not one of them. Last year, two-thirds of our £210m revenues came from print – from the Guardian and Observer newspapers. We’ve recently revamped and refreshed our print offering and committed substantial marketing spend to support it. The newspaper remains a vital asset.”

Now, of course, the gap here isn’t anything like as big as these extracts can make it seem. Miller walks the digital walk himself with aplomb. But no one should suppose there won’t be problems of pace, direction and hard choices. To expand overseas? To stick to free or try paywalls? To get out of, or stay in, print? To decide what the trust’s commitment to support “in perpetuity” means in a digital world where everything changes every five minutes?

The assumption that head trustee Rusbridger, moving on, will enjoy a quieter academic life in some Oxbridge redoubt looks dubious going on slightly incredible. The assumption that his successor will be able to chart his or her own customarily independent course in such circumstances seems pretty questionable, too. Uncertainty as usual then: but making it constructive, consensual and revolutionary may prove the most uncertain task of the lot as another long, testing journey into the unknown begins.