As early as 1997, when liberal capitalism was rampant across the Atlantic and history was abolished, a newspaper came in the morning. The newspaper you get depends not only on your taste, but also on where you live: if you are a coastal American, you might get a large information department store like the New York Times, Washington Post, or Los Angeles Times, but big cities There are their equivalents in the middle, from the Chicago Tribune to the Arizona Republic. If you are British, you might buy one of the country’s highly competitive national counterparts, such as The Telegraph, Times or The Guardian. Or you might prefer a boisterous scandal and moral bile spreader like the British Daily Mail, The Sun, or the New York Post. These are big headlines, but most towns have some kind of daily newspaper that mixes local, national, and international news, and is funded by cover prices and advertisements. During the day, on the way to work, in the workplace, in the cafeteria, on the radio, there will be news, or continue to pick up paper corpses. In the evening, there will be TV news from NBC, ABC, CBS, BBC or ITN, and you will watch it once at a fixed time (Even in 1997, CNN and Sky News were still quite niche; Fox News has just started, BBC’s 24 hours The news channel started broadcasting that fall). After the online news, there will be a local TV briefing. In some evenings, there will be special news programs and longer programs, such as CBS’s 60 minutes, ITV’s world in action or BBC’s panoramic view. On weekends, you might settle down and read a US news magazine "Time" or "Newsweek", or one of the Sunday papers: the British Observer or the Sunday Post or the large number of Sunday editions of the New York Times (this is The largest number ever, on September 14, 1987, 1612 pages, weighing 12 pounds). Supporting the entire news media ecosystem are two main news organizations (The Telegram in the newsroom): The Associated Press and Reuters, which, together with the British Press Association, make it possible for editors to expand their coverage beyond their limits. . Own staff and budget, and played a powerful agenda setting effect in the news audience invisible.

There is no shortage of people in the industry who understand that things are about to change. But it is difficult to predict what the change will look like, let alone the destructive nature of this process to the old order. In that era, The Guardian wanted to buy a printer for each reader and let them print newspapers at home. By 1997, the Internet had been well established, but its usage had not yet taken off. Some newspapers have basic websites, but few people visit them. The main way to surf the Internet is the slow and inconvenient dial-up method; very few home users have broadband connections. The pictures are loaded line by line. This may take a few minutes. Even with YouTube, home computers won't have the bandwidth to stream clips. There is no Facebook or Twitter, and there is no smart phone that can be hunched over. The management class checked the early websites and tried to put them into existing categories: this is a bit like an encyclopedia, that a bit like a library, this is basically a mail-order catalog, and that, um, it’s just a newspaper, isn’t it , Just on the screen, instead of turning pages, you choose from the menu. But 1997 was a crucial year to eliminate complacency. Two PhD students from Stanford University registered the domain name google.com. Steve Jobs returned to Apple, made Joni Ive his chief designer, and began to walk the road to the iPhone ten years later. The main wireless protocol-the system that later received the "Wi-Fi" trademark-was launched.

On the morning of Sunday, August 31, 1997, I got up for the first time for no reason. In Moscow, where I lived (which happened to be employed by The Guardian, a paper edited by Alan Rusbridger from 1995 to 2015), early summer dawned and it was very hot outside, even though the city was already asleep. *I turn on the computer I recently purchased and connect to the Internet. After the dialing sound subsided and the browser opened, I visited a website that I started last year, the online version of the Sunday Times. When loading the front page, my first thought was that someone in the Murdoch organization must be in terrible trouble. Obviously, they made up fictional stories on their systems in the early hours of the morning, and one of them went online unexpectedly. I don't remember the exact content of the headline I read, such as: "The Princess of Wales was seriously injured in a car accident in Paris." I confirmed this to the BBC World Service via my shortwave radio and understood that it was true. Will anyone not be overwhelmed by news of this unlikely event? If I have considered what the death of the princess and the secular canonization mean to the newspaper industry, then or for many years to come, I might carefully consider the collapse of the paparazzi market created by the tabloids. The pursuit of some kind of news killed Diana, and, strangely, it resulted in more news. But in retrospect, the moment I read that article was also the first time I saw the collapse of traditional newspapers.

Two things inspired the newspaper, and that was how the news reached me in my personal capacity that morning. The first is that newspapers are actually breaking news: news in the most traditional sense, news that the most sane editorial writer of the New York Times and the most brutal checkbook merchant of the Post agree is news. Rare news makes people call people they know and say "Hey, did you hear...?" Yes-at least to me-was not broken by the sound of radio or TV, announcing "We interrupt this Broadcasting brings you...", but in written form. Before I knew it, I saw the rebirth of text as a natural provider of immediacy. This state now seems natural in the age of Twitter and news alerts pushed to mobile phones, but in 1997, several generations were given up. oral.

Another reason for the trust of newspapers is that I was in Moscow, reading a newspaper published in London, more than 1,500 miles away, and flying for four hours. In fact, it is not actually published because it has not yet been printed. The first edition of The Sunday Times of the day was already on the way to newsstands and homes in Scotland and the north and west of England, and it was out of date-it did not mention the accident of the princess-these can only be reached by a brave person Local efforts to distribute fuel, wheels and muscles. After a day or two, some copies will flow overseas, appearing on a few newsstands in places like Paris or New York, but for practical purposes, paper daily newspapers are restricted to a few hundred miles from where they are printed. Britain’s national newspapers cannot be international; America’s largest regional daily newspapers are struggling with well-designed satellite printing operations and joint services, even national ones. Now, all of a sudden, the only limit to the immediate distribution of any newspaper worldwide is the speed of the Internet itself.

However, the collapse of this physical limitation on the influence of news organizations is both threatening and promising. If you can sit in Moscow and read the London-based "Sunday Times" live report of the Paris incident, then you can easily read its competitors "The Observer", "Boston Globe" or "South China Morning Post." Or, if you speak French well, then newspapers like Le Monde are actually located in Paris. The most threatening to old media organizations is that you can learn more about them. Ordinary readers can not completely become their own editors, but their own news curators, summoning any source they like. And, from the newspaper's perspective, there is another more disturbing aspect of the way I got the news from that morning on the Internet. It didn't cost me anything. I don’t have to enter a password. I was not charged a cent directly, sold to advertisers through a one-time fee or subscription, or indirectly through my clicks. As the owner of The Sunday Times, News International took on huge production costs — journalists’ salaries, printing and distributing paper newspapers — and then gave me products and news for nothing.

why? Why is news "free" and the production cost of news is so high? In the early days of the Internet, when most people couldn't access it, there seemed to be room for experimentation. No one wants to be left behind by the digital revolution. For news organizations, providing some or all of the text and pictures on the website for free at first does not seem like a gift, but more like a reward for nerds and news fans, mainly paid products Gimmick accessory. There is a more calm calculation. Before the advent of the Internet, anyone working in the newspaper industry was not familiar with the concept of "free news", which appeared in weekly or daily free newspapers. This kind of newsprint packaging is a crepe of cheap news, gossip and reviews packed into a large number of small advertisements, and it is delivered to your door free of charge. It is a fixture in the former Internet media world. In fact, in the late 1990s, the British executives of organizations such as The Guardian were more worried about the impact of the Internet or more worried about the erosion of their market by the new free meter Metro. This was a toss. The Daily Mail began to be distributed to commuters. The economics of newspapers is that the share of advertising in revenue is always greater than the cover price. Cover price income is seen as a necessary condition to provide a richer news industry, which makes paid newspapers different from free newspapers—paying reporters’ time, foreign reporters, and everyone else—but newspapers that are fully funded by advertising are for View of everyone's services. It seems that long ago, some newspaper executives-Rusbridger may be one of them-made a guess: soon, the paper part of the newspaper will disappear completely, instead of printing and distributing paper news to save money The money will be used as compensation for the money lost due to the underwriting price. Like commercial television stations, newspapers will become broadcasters, financed by advertising alone.

The other reason for this idea is that you don’t have to pay for news on the Internet. On the idealistic side, the notion of communitarianism radiates charm because of its way of sounding fair, pirate, and revolutionary at the same time, adding color to the spirit of the times: the notion that rejects those who have brain power to gain brainpower The fruits of labor are indecent. Can not afford. The difference between the rights and errors of free access to medical research, computer software, songs, movies, books, and newspaper articles—in fact, the definition of “free”—has become blurred. At a hacker conference in 1984, an old out-of-context statement by the former editor of the Global Catalog, Stewart Brand, was heavily quoted: "Information wants freedom."

In addition to the idealism that "Guardian" staff and readers particularly like, the newspaper also fears that they will be bypassed by other free sources of information. This new form of dissemination can destroy the rigid pyramid of privilege and authority caused by the high cost of disseminating information under the old system. On the Internet, information may be deprived of the old signs of authority—authority in the sense of power and reliable and accurate authority—and we often judge it without thinking. It is difficult and expensive. It requires a lot of smart people and technology to design newspaper pages and print them into hundreds of thousands of copies without smudging or blurring. The headlines and columns are clear on durable paper, and the pictures are clear, carefully selected and placed. very good. Individuals or small organizations that want to create alternative sources of information will not only be limited by the difficulties of copying and distribution or content weaknesses, but also by the physical differences between their output and the "authoritative" media. On the one hand, a newspaper; on the other, type five pages with a typewriter, draw the mistakes and type them out, add some hand-painted graphics and photos cut from the magazine, and then copy and bind each page. At the same time, there are dozens or hundreds of brochures that are for distribution...how to distribute? For everyone who is attracted by the authenticity and possibility of the mysterious truth in the underground and samizdat media, there are thousands of conservative readers who will not take these sources seriously because they exude fanaticism, solitary obsession and amateurism. Smell.

In the 1990s, this performance hierarchy collapsed. Any bettor with a computer can use the same clear and elegant Times Roman font used by Murdoch to type "DIANA". Just like they did at the time, the words they typed will have exactly the same clear outline and the same clear Pixel space is like the words sent to them by the Sunday Times in London. Readers who used to passively read the work of large publishers may become active writers and publishers: they can write blogs and design their own websites. What they produce no longer necessarily makes them look like scruffy weirdos or fanatics. To be sure, the level of performance on the Internet still exists: there are beautifully designed and flashy websites, as well as crappy, clumsy websites. But in the past ten years or so, large social media platforms have been excellent expressive balancers. The design framework provided by Twitter and Facebook gives everyone's text, everyone's thoughts, and everyone's nonsense, the same professional gloss. Why not use the title "Diana was killed in a car accident" and add "By MI 5" at the end and share it?

Rusbridger said that he saw the future during his 1993 US media tour, although the Guardian and Observer, its Sunday sisters, did not launch their fully-fledged Internet service until 1998. "Only four days later," he wrote that the first new media believed, "The future of information will be mainly digital, which seems very obvious. But how exactly do you transplant digital thinking and processes to magnificent ocean-going prints? How can you convince anyone that this should be a priority when no one has figured out how to make money from it? As Stewart Brand said in the full version of his infamous motto ten years ago: "On the one hand, Information wants to be expensive because it is too valuable. Providing the right information in the right place will only change your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of acquiring it has been getting lower and lower. So you let these two fight each other.

For old-style news organizations in general-now usually referred to by the acrimonious phrase "traditional media"-especially newspapers, the past two decades have been trying to embrace all possibilities and resist the threats of the Internet at the same time as a hard copy. Provide funds to maintain loyal readers and advertisers despite the reduced amount. The smaller local newspapers were unable to impress the rest of the world with their in-depth knowledge of Des Moines or Sheffield affairs, due to the collapse of their print circulation and the advertisers they depended on-real estate agents, Car dealers, local retailers, have been linked and integrated anyway-migrated to search engines and aggregation sites. As advertising and paper sales revenue declined, newspapers had to cut costs. The labor force was cut. They are still being cut: In July of this year, the new owner of the New York Daily News cut its reporter staff by half. With fewer reporters, fewer and fewer articles, and thinner and thinner articles, people have fewer reasons to buy the paper version, and it also devalues ​​the online version.

In the United States, print newspaper advertising has fallen from US$67 billion in 2000 to well below US$20 billion today; taking into account population growth, the circulation of American newspapers has halved since its peak in the mid-1980s. In the UK, the circulation of regional and local newspapers has halved in the past decade. During the same period, the number of journalists decreased from 23,000 to 17,000. In 2006, the Associated Press, the publisher of the Daily Mail, rejected a £1 billion offer for its local newspaper chain. Six years later, it had to settle with another local news company's shares for 53 million pounds, and the company had fallen into a death whirlpool. Rusbridger did not say what he thought the Guardian’s parent company, the Guardian Media Group, would get from selling the Manchester Evening News when it became aware of the impending crisis in 2005-but it would follow a similar order to the £7.4 million it received when it sold five years later. Cash plus forgiveness of debt is even more.

The pictures of the large beasts in the old newspaper forest are more complicated. For some people, the decline is steep. Newsweek-a profitable and influential mid-range news magazine whose circulation soared to 3.4 million copies in 1997-was sold by its owner for $1 in 2010, and the upstart website Daily Beast The merger, which was liberated from "The Beast" from 2012 to 2014 and earlier this year, now its predecessor is an empty, understaffed shell, seeing its experience fired a group of their own senior reporters, Attempts to suppress investigations into the magazine's financial status were unsuccessful. Newsweek is particularly vulnerable to the massive amounts of free information and images released on the Internet. It is dull, boring, and over-digested; in contrast, the Internet seems to magically integrate current events into the original vitality and details of the event itself. But at the same time, even the plainness of Newsweek is incomplete. The magazine strives to maintain a balance at a conceptual political center point, and the emergence of the Internet has shown that it can be more tolerated than one likes in the absence of alternatives. Although it is innocuous, if you read it, you will most likely find something in it that contradicts the way you want the world. In other words, the advent of the Internet exposed Newsweek and similar magazines as boring and unpleasant. Just as the global food distribution revolution has allowed people in rich countries to abandon seasonality and scarcity and create delicious diets for themselves, whether they are harmful or not, the Internet makes and encourages people to create news diets that contain only what they want to hear—— Excitement without challenge, pudding without vegetables.

Other old media giants with more unique voices will not wither so easily. Even as early as 1997, some large companies made it clear that they did not have trucks with free news. The Wall Street Journal began to let readers pay for online access—later called a pay zone. Others couldn't keep up, but in the late 2000s and early 2010s, a series of large papers made a leap. The Times of London and The Sunday Times fell behind the paywall in 2010; a year later, they had the same name in New York. The Washington Post, The Economist, The New Yorker, and The Telegraph—and the London Review of Books—are all the same, although most subscription models are more like fences than walls. In this sense, you can visit the website and read articles before some restrictions were lifted. The online subscription model is the easiest for professional publications such as the Financial Times or Wall Street Journal-hundreds of thousands of readers now pay two to three times the cost of Spotify subscribers for music-and newsletters- -Professional intelligence magazines that experts like engineers, doctors or horse breeders have no choice but to read. For ordinary newspapers, it is more difficult because its former digital legacy efforts cover everything, Chinese trade policy and Manchester United transfer policy, criminal trials and medical trials, social change and climate change, as well as recipes, movie reviews, weather forecasts and The input crossword-"random information packet", as Rusbridger said, it is the guardian before the numbers, "glued together by glue that appears in the same printed package." When Rupert Murdoch tried to pay for The Sun, readers would not cough.

But what if you don’t have a paywall? Your loss in income, in theory, you will gain from having more readers. This is the route taken by the Guardian under Russbridge and remains unchanged under the leadership of his successor Katharine Viner. By providing its website to ordinary readers for free, the “Guardian” has joined a variety of large free news websites, which are scrambling to attract attention on the English-speaking streets. Each website has its own funding model: BBC, Daily Mail, CNN, MSNBC, Buzzfeed, Vice, Fox News, Huffington Post. There are also English-language Al Jazeera and satellites. Any one of a million blogs, online fan magazines, discussion sites, hobby forums, gossip, and conspiracy exchanges, in theory and practice, all of these can provide what readers might think of as "news." How can a free online newspaper with global ambitions maintain the weight of the report, making it more than just a global free newspaper, moaning with clickbait and lightly rewritten third-party copies? Some veteran editors (Rusbridger is one of them) hope that the Internet will release the suppressed desire of their readers, share their understanding of the world, and that digital newspapers can open up new channels for knowledgeable experts, or have unique experience and Ordinary readers with good ideas can help generate rolling reports. Readers will become collaborators, colleagues, contributors-of course for free.

On February 29, 2012, the "Guardian" new one-minute ad was broadcast for the first time. The idea is to promote Rusbridger's belief in "open journalism" that readers of digital news organizations should have the right to help guide their reporting theory. At the beginning of the ad, the POV was zoomed in on the PC screen, and one of the headlines was entered on the Guardian homepage: "The Big Bad Wolf is alive." We switched to the police SWAT team broke into the home of the three little pigs, citing the murder of the wolf. Arrest them. We saw the “Guardian” video broadcast reporting the arrests, and then on their mobile phones, and the gathered audience/readers-all young people, and the nervous expressions of the actors showed how they focused on important things-with a lot of Respond in a thoughtful manner, polite and informed challenge or recognition of the Guardian’s first draft of history. 'This is not right. The three little pigs are the victims. "The wolf blew down two houses and he got what he deserved." Someone sent a video of a wolf on a bus panting through an inhaler to the Guardian. How could he blow down the pig's house? "The wolf has asthma," the new Guardian reported. To pay tribute to the 9/11 conspiracy theorists, we saw that the Guardian ran a graphic to illustrate that even healthy wolves lack the panting claims of blowing up houses. Informed readers’ skepticism about the official version pursued by The Guardian paid off: The pigs admitted to framing the wolf so that they could use false insurance claims to repay heavy mortgages. Banks are now the focus of public anger and news. Anti-financial protesters clashed with the police. "Unrest sparked reform debate" was the last headline of the Guardian, and in the end we saw readers once again becoming passive receivers of information, reading stories on tablets, paper, mobile phones and laptops.

Rusbridger's ideal news article should be an article that is constantly adjusted based on reader input, just like a Wikipedia article, but the author of the article is its curator, long after the first publication. He claimed to have been successful in canvassing readers for volunteers, for example, filtering data from company tax avoidance documents: “Sometimes we just ask readers a question: We don’t have direct knowledge to explain this offshore arrangement, but we know that among you Some of you will. Can you help us? He said that the resulting journalism "is often better than what we do ourselves." The United States has also tried a similar approach, called "transparent journalism"; Washington, DC The Post's David Fahrenthold used social media to spread the loopholes in his investigation of Donald Trump's charity and fill some of them.

The use of social media by journalists to attract the public to information — risking little risk of revealing to competitors what the journalist is doing, what she knows and what she doesn’t know — has brought some good results. These may be difficult to distinguish from "tips from reliable sources" (an organization as old as news); expanding the reporter's address book to include followers on Facebook and Twitter may introduce misinformation and truth, not to mention Said in vain. For example, you want to know who of the Guardian staff is responsible for answering questions about the legal field of tax avoidance that "just thrown at the reader".

Rusbridger's more ambitious collaboration is based on the assumption that in the digital world, people want to use mature media organizations like the Guardian as an outlet for their ideas, internal knowledge, and experience. But when they can visit Facebook or Twitter and get instant comments, likes, and conversations, why do they do it? Traditional news media found themselves first reporting on events broadcast on Twitter or Facebook. This may be what happens in the real world—for example, mobile phones equipped with cameras are everywhere, which is a form of racist police violence—or social media itself may generate a "story" that fits the model: " People A’s tweets about B have been welcomed with anger and irony, such as this interesting tweet by C. Rusbridger hopes readers will help shape the news story, which now seems unreasonable, because traditional news media will inevitably think that it may be It may also be that people who are not readers feed on stories that are ruined on social media.

Modern news readers may lack cooperation, and they make up for this in their response. Sometimes, responding to comments on Guardian articles is constructive, useful, and knowledgeable. Eliot Higgins originally posted in the comments section under the Guardian's article on the Middle East. He now runs Bellingcat, an investigative agency that uses social media analysis to expose foreign weapons supplies to Syrian rebels, track Russian intervention in Ukraine, and identify agents spreading nerve agents in Salisbury. But these comments are often partisan, acrimonious, or abusive. They also tend to be anonymous. Rusbridger described what happened when, in the spirit of open journalism, the newspaper expanded its online column section to bring in a wider range of external voices, and urged its high-paying resident columnists and what they wrote:

For every piece above the line, there will be dozens, sometimes hundreds—and sometimes thousands—comments offline. It feels like the Internet is doomed: in contrast to the old world, in the old world, the reader will write a letter hoping to attract the attention of the editor. This is the democratization of opinions. Or is it? The writer-in-residence cannot decide...for some people this is philosophy. "The world has always been divided up by clubs and thugs," said a senior columnist for De Tocqueville... "I'm afraid I'm on the side of the club."

If a column is about economy, culture, or science, you can have a "fairly reasonable discussion." If it's about feminism, Israel/Palestine, Islam, or immigration, then these clues can quickly become ugly. Readers flooded into the site directly from search engines, without knowing what the Guardian was or not knowing that they were on the website of a news organization called The Guardian. Others are trying to stand out from the Guardian writers simply because they are Guardian writers. The paper introduces the moderator. They can't keep up. The number of moderators of this paper has tripled. They still cannot read everything. In the end, Rusbridger said, “The job of mods has become firefighting—fighting trolls wherever they appear.” It was Jackie Ashley who was skeptical of the lightly regulated comment thread, who wrote to La Sbridgeer: "There will always be someone who knows a topic better than a columnist. Similarly, there will always be someone who thinks they know more. I am very happy to receive letters from both sides: as long as you make the right argument, don't call me him. Damn stupid cow.

Last year, the advertising industry magazine Adweek published an article about the Guardian's "Three Little Pigs" advertisement, praising it as a "really transcended" great work in history. But the article also includes an interview with David Kolbuz, the creative director of the agency that produced it at the time, who said the ad was a relic of a more promising era, only five years ago. He said that open journalism failed to explain "movements based on subjective interpretations of facts and alternative truths created by disseminators of misinformation-mainly for profit." Open news is based on the idea that non-reporters will help news organizations find the objective truth, and when we actually live in a world where different groups of people fully agree with the truth in different regions. Newspapers are not the only traditional information organization that has entered the Internet. There are also the successors of the current Division A of the KGB First General Administration, who were responsible for spreading false news in the capitalist media before the advent of the Internet. There are descendants of American right-wing media activists in the 1940s and 1950s. They were initially radicalized by opposing the U.S. joining the war against Hitler. They established the first conservative radio program and magazine network to promote their ideas. But Hemo said, "Objectivity is a mask used by mainstream media to cover up their ideological projects." Some people just made up something, but can spread their fake news around the world more effectively than the most powerful news tycoon in the newspaper's glory days, and in doing so anonymously. Rusbridger quoted Internet guru Clay Shirky as saying that funding for charity news is a kind of social charity: "Socializing is the way most birthday parties are made, and most picnics are made, right? It's just not a major feature of the landscape. But now Yes. Birthday parties and picnics are indeed good examples of "social events." So are lynchings, massacres, and witch hunts.

In the days before the Internet, the stability or virtues of English-language news media should not be exaggerated. The popularity of television in the mid-twentieth century greatly reduced the newspaper's territory: the British left-wing "Daily Herald" once sold 2 million copies a day, and is now one of the many books abandoned by poor working-class readers. Mass TV. Advertisers followed and closed in 1964, 50 years after the launch of the Herald. I have been working in the newspaper since 1985 in a small town in the central region. People think that the media is declining, and there is an annoying question: when can people use TV and radio, as well as the "reporting" in magazines and books. What happened", what exactly is the newspaper used for?

This book is an autobiographical description of the career journey from a local Cambridge reporter to the helmsman of the new Global Guardian on the one hand, and a broader examination of the crisis on the other. The "news" of the hyper-connected era. There are reasons to weave these strands together. Rusbridger's career coincided with a dizzying interruption. It started when newspapers were still made by giant machines handcrafted by men, which wrote words from molten metal droplets. He got off his guardian before the election for the president of the United States, and was willing to lie directly from the device in his pocket to more than 50 million readers. If sometimes the book reads like Rusbridger’s editor is a retelling of the most popular “Guardian” work, then this may also be reasonable, because if the “Guardian” and the like might not pursue this The ledger of Public Service News went from investigating Jonathan Aitken (Jonathan Aitken) and finally imprisoned for perjury to Nick Davies' exposure of tabloid phone wiretapping, which led to the suspension of News of the World.

For Rusbridger, the culmination of his editorial work was the Guardian’s role in exposing the industrial-scale espionage of its citizens by Western intelligence agencies in 2013, thanks to the announcement by Edward Snowden Thousands of documents stolen from the National Security Agency. Most of the reason why the first Posnorden shock wave appeared in the Guardian (the Washington Post shared in an early disclosure) was that the previous year Russbridge poached Glen Green, a radical critic of the American security agency, from the Salon website. Wald, strengthening the Guardian’s growing business in the United States. Greenwald's blog has 1 million readers. Rusbridger is prepared to let Greenwald, the host of The Guardian, on his own terms, instead of trying to get him into the newsroom like a traditional reporter. Rusbridger wrote that Greenwald is a model of "open journalism" and he

I think the most interesting point of the day is when he presses "send". At that time the story began its real life. People will start to respond to it, attack it, praise it, share it, add it, point out errors, suggest new clues... If he makes a mistake, he wants to know as soon as possible so that he can correct it. If there are missing things, he will add them. He has new ideas for next week's column. The reader can check the unclear things. If people doubt him, he can add details, sources, or links. Within a few hours after publication, his story will improve.

Snowden is one of Greenwald's readers. When he made up his mind to tell the world what he knew and claimed to be a whistleblower, he deeply distrusted the media in power: In his opinion, the New York Times’ slowness in publishing earlier information disclosures dominated them. As a showcase of his materials. But he also didn't want to go the route of WikiLeaks dumping files to the Internet. He wants to leak through a responsible filter. Snowden also contacted filmmaker Laura Poitras, who in turn sought advice from The Post’s Patton Gellman. However, by recruiting Greenwald, Russbridge promoted to Snowden that the Guardian is a sufficiently avant-garde news organization that can counter the most secret part of the government while still providing the status and influence of traditional media.

It's easy to understand why Rusbridger wants Greenwald: Even if you don't pay much attention to open journalism, you can think of his recruitment as a wise traditional move-hiring a unique voice that matches the Guardian's demographics. But it is interesting to consider why Greenwald is preparing to move to the Guardian. He said at the beginning that the newspaper "provides an opportunity to reach new readers and further internationalize my readers." In other words, The Guardian has become internationalized and internationalized in a way that was not available before the Internet. It is no longer just a small British newspaper: it is also an American news organization, a fact that was recognized by the Pulitzer Prize and shared its coverage of Snowden with the Washington Post. In the 1990s and early 2000s, the Guardian lags behind its closest British competitor, The Times, in terms of circulation and international visibility. When you tell people in the United States that you work for the Guardian, most people have not heard of it; if anything, they tend to be older people who think it is still called the Manchester Guardian. In October 2014, the Guardian surpassed the New York Times to once become the world's leading serious English newspaper website. (Measuring Internet audiences is a worrying and controversial thing, but when writing the Alexa ranking of Amazon's global news site, the Guardian ranked fifth, behind Reddit, CNN, New York Times and Google News.) In short, it has become Rusbridger used many times in his book, a global brand. This is not just because of the Internet. This happened because the Guardian invested a lot of money in digital operations and American employees, and it happened because, when its competitors set up paywalls, the Digital Guardian stayed free-it was open The other side of news, that is, the principle that the content produced by news organizations should be open for everyone to read.

Rusbridger is not the only person responsible for this, but he is a stubborn supporter. This was and is still a risky strategy, and there has been controversy within the thesis. Rusbridger's slogan is "arrival first, revenue later": burn your cash while building a customer base. When your more timid, backward-looking competitors are eliminated, you can worry about monetizing them later. This is great for Silicon Valley startups, but the Guardian is not one of them. It has no investors: it is owned by a trust called the Scott Trust, and its articles of association prohibit the sale of the organization to competitors, the circulation of it on the stock market, or the payment of dividends to shareholders. The Guardian does not have license fee income like the BBC, nor does it have state funding like Al Jazeera and Sputnik, nor does it have cross subsidies like CNN or Fox. It has high management costs and low business income. It is killing each other, laying off employees in the UK, and cannibalizing reserves to expand in numbers and the US. The Guardian’s print circulation has fallen to 138,000—less than a third of what it was before the advent of the Internet—but we can now estimate that it now has approximately 10 million daily visitors. People have high hopes that this amazing increase in the number of readers around the world, especially in the United States, will lead to a corresponding boom in American advertising: it can sell millions of readers to advertisers instead of hundreds of thousands of people who read it. The days before the Internet will financially make up for the revenue loss caused by the plunge in printing circulation and the refusal to establish paywalls. But just when the Guardian seemed ready to use its new influence, the digital advertising market was swallowed up by Facebook and Google. These Internet phenomena are not so much websites as they are technologies created to profit from the content of others. platform. The era of programmatic advertising has arrived.

It's hard to convey the weirdness of programmatic advertising. As Karl Miller described in "Death of the Gods: A New Global Seizure of Power", "You don’t buy space in a specific publication; you buy space in front of a certain type of people, regardless of whether they happen to be on the Internet. Anywhere.'†Thanks to the Russian election interference scandal in the United States and the Cambridge Analytica incident in the United Kingdom, which was mainly revealed by the observer Carole Cadwalladr, many people understand this. We also understand that Google and Facebook are better than anyone, even ourselves We all know who we are, because they know what we are looking for, what we like and what we don’t like. We are not very familiar with the actual process of getting ads on the Internet. Broadly speaking, every time you visit a website Nowadays, usually on your mobile phone, your signature-or as much personal information as the website can collect-will be broadcast to robot advertising trading platforms around the world, which will automatically solicit advertisements from robots The bid of the supplier will place your tailor-made ads in the ad space on the page you are viewing. Robot advertisers will bid based on their algorithm’s evaluation of potential consumers of your product as a customer. The winning robot bid The advertiser’s advertisement is sent to the exchange, which sends it to the website, and the website displays it on the page you are reading. The whole process takes about 200 milliseconds-literally, faster than a blink of an eye. In the 2010s In the mid-term, large news publishers who were just beginning to think they might have corrected themselves found themselves having to run Google or Facebook ad scripts on their websites. After the giants got a share of the pie, these scripts left them with meager income. In 2017, duopoly accounted for 63.1% of total digital advertising spending in the United States; figures in the United Kingdom are believed to be comparable. Recent data shows that the rise of Google-Facebook has weakened, but it will only benefit other Internet giants such as Amazon and Snapchat .

It is too early to leave the traditional media behind, or it is assumed that the newly familiar giant will not one day become the victim of the same vitality that has allowed Facebook to change from nothing to a behemoth that suffocates the world in ten years. When Rusbridger stepped down from the Guardian in 2015, the operation began to bleed heavily. By the second year, Guardian Media Group, the newspaper's holding company, had a pre-tax loss of 173 million pounds. It seems that the Rusbridger era has brought huge news achievements and empty coffers to millions of readers: no income impact. The appointment of Rusbridger as chairman of the Scott Trust was shelved and he left the organization. But two years later, this painting looks more promising. The remaining old investments of GMG have been consolidated into a £1 billion endowment fund, which will provide income for the journalism industry and operates in a very similar way to the Wellcome Trust. Although Katharine Viner does not like paywalls like Rusbridger, and paper sales continue to decline, the Guardian proposes another way to raise funds from readers: fundraising like Wikipedia, or at the entrance to the museum that is nominally free Place a prominent cash box. Anyone can read the Guardian online for free, but Wiener said in November that 1 million readers have made some form of voluntary financial donation. It hopes to achieve a balance of payments in 2019. On the other side of the Atlantic, another generalist newspaper, the New York Times, had digital subscription revenue of $340 million in 2017, and its revenue grew as fast as Facebook and faster than Google.

At the end of his book, Russbridge allowed him to be too optimistic about reader participation in "Open News": "It turns out that most readers don't want to participate in news: they just want to read or watch it. He pointed out, In 2016, NPR removed reader comments from its online stories, as did Vice, who declared: “We don’t have time or hope to continue monitoring this junk. "Rusbridger's ambivalence about news collaboration methods is deeper. Although he insists on the importance of the reader's voice in the digital age, he did not quote anything. The Guardian implicitly defended the aggrieved and powerless, but after Snowden, at the time Senior officials of the British government and many of his editorial colleagues opposed Russbridge, accusing him of betraying his country by sabotaging their security services. In order to combat terrorism, he turned to support opposition from national elites to international elites: "Google’s Eric Schmidt attended the unforgettable Guardian private dinner in Davos; Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web; Vodafone’s owner Vittory Klaus (Vittori Colao); former Swedish Prime Minister Karl Bildt; LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman; and Fadi Chehadé, CEO of the agency responsible for coordinating the Internet.

It is worth mentioning that the position of the editor of The Guardian must reflect to a large extent the position of its readers. More broadly, it is the position of hundreds of millions of people who are university-educated, left-leaning, openly tolerant, and concerned about society. All over the world-global liberalism, because of the lack of better ways of expression. On the surface, "Private Dinner with Google’s Eric Schmidt in Davos" is the opposite of seeing the world from the perspective of ordinary citizens. However, this is where global liberalism finds itself, trading between power and powerlessness, the worst case is the desire to gain all the street credibility to stand with the crowd, and all the benefits of attending parties with powerful people The best case is to try to be an honest messenger between the two. Unable to choose between the club and the mob, in other words, but want to be accepted by both, so it is not trusted by either party. Reflecting on the mutually beneficial but disturbing relationship between the Guardian and Julian Assange during the WikiLeaks incident, Russbridge wrote:

I once told a senior intelligence officer that the British and American governments should not condemn our role, but should kneel and thank us as a careful filter. If there were no newspapers, they would face a more terrifying and thornier problem... How dismissive Assange would be if he had such an idea. How much he would despise my contact with such a person, or the fact that I made him anonymous in this narrative.

In this case, being found to be a little untrustworthy is an honorable post, but it will never be comfortable.

When Rusbridger deviates from a simple fact, there will be a strange moment of cognitive dissonance, that is, no matter how a paper builds its readership, the readership is always the public, not the public. Just like reporting news, the Guardian must provoke power and trade with it—a state of affairs that is unacceptable to some on the left—the Guardian cannot maintain its status as a free voice and expand its influence without alienating it, and may even use Some small way increases the isolation of those who disagree with its concerns. When the Internet opens the door to new freedom of distribution, the Guardian, as a liberal British newspaper, may go further, giving readers more freedom to understand local affairs in different parts of the UK, or, more broadly, by providing a source From the British perspective on liberal affairs in North America and other regions. By investing heavily in the United States, it has taken the second route. It’s hard to get rid of the impression of being at the bottom of the Guardian reader’s well, rather than trying to deepen the well—for example, by tailoring versions for different parts of England—the newspaper is looking for people who are already readers of the Guardian. The United States has not yet realized this. It wasn't until November 2015 that the Guardian established a "news center" in the north of England in its native Manchester.

Rusbridger described a series of exchanges with Dean Baquet, the executive editor of The New York Times. Barquette grew up in New Orleans, and he worried that paywalls like his newspapers were creating a gap between the wealthy few who could afford a healthy and diverse information diet and the poor, who were spamming news. "I am afraid of a world with only wealthy elite media," he wrote in a letter to Russbridge. "I may be comfortable sitting at Savoy for dinner, but I am also a person who grew up in a poor community in the southern United States. And I don't quite believe that people like the young dean can afford the report that we all edit. This It doesn’t help the disagreements that plague the world. Strangely, it’s not easy for the young Dean Baquet to read the New York Times in New Orleans, because it is a foreign product and not available on every street corner. Here. He could have read New Orleans’ own daily newspaper, Times-Picayune, which contains local, national and international news, but only if he or his parents paid for it, or someone gave him a copy. In the new digital world Whether it is possible for the young dean to subscribe to the Times when he can afford it, or read the Guardian for free, is two of the many factors that kill the remaining resources of Times-Picayune.

Sometimes, compared to today's post-truth vortex, Rusbridger evokes the pre-Internet era of news media as if it were a golden age. 'In recent centuries, anyone who has grown up in Western democracies believes that it is necessary to have the facts...We think that maybe the facts are easy to obtain, and this is a matter of course. And over time, we have developed very effective methods to distinguish between true and false... The fundamental importance of any reliable and unconstrained news community is one of the most important values ​​of the Enlightenment. Elsewhere, given the ubiquity of what we now call "paywalls" before the advent of the Internet, the identity of "us" is being questioned. When Rusbridger was quoted and approved, Baquet asked, "Is there anyone else... who shared with the new reality that 98% of Americans are now excluded from the New York Times news report and will most likely have to deal with The worries about substandard information", what are they? "Restatement also means that the pre-Internet era was heavily polluted by elitism and exclusivity, because the "New York Times" is not free, and it is difficult to get out of New York.

Another hypothesis is that 98% of Americans who cannot or do not want to pay to read The New York Times are actually eager to read it: the possibility of reading the New York Times for free may be a realistic dose, a cure for the previously healthy America People are infected with the disease of fake news. I believe that people have actually changed since the news migrated to the Internet. Believing in the theory of "invading body snatchers" would be comforting, but I suspect that the fact is that people have the same underlying tendencies as before. On the contrary, the Internet has brought these trends to the surface in new ways. "We take it for granted," Rusbridger wrote. "The facts are easy to get." Maybe some of us did it. Many people say it differently: “We think we don’t really know or are not really told what happened. This is a matter of course.” Some people always put simple, secret explanations above complex, open explanations; Always trying to distinguish their own ideas from "common sense"; always interpreting their incompetence as a conspiracy of the strong, keeping them in the dark; always inclined to believe any story that confirms their prejudice; in fact, They oppose the definition of "news" and prefer to repeatedly modify the old stories of thieves, killers, champions, heroes, monsters, lunatics, gangsters, kings and prostitutes.

The Internet has not changed people's relationship with news, but has changed their self-awareness when reading news. Before, we were isolated news receivers; now, we consciously become members of groups that respond to news in a common way. Amazingly, this promotes the unity of the truly oppressed, the activists, and the minority. But it also means that paranoid, paranoid, xenophobic, and conspiring people know that they are not alone. They realize that they are a collective, as a spectator, crying, cheering, questioning and screaming from a safe dark booth, occasionally jumping onto the stage with masks, pulling down the performers’ pants or triggering a false panic that the theater is on fire .

Rusbridger recognizes that as a whole, even if the public wants to know the truth, they are alienated from the news media, especially traditional media. He called on reporters to remain humble and admired David Broder's description of news reports as "one-sided, rushed, incomplete, inevitably flawed, and unavoidable about some of the things we heard in the past 24 hours." Inaccurate presentation". His concept of "open journalism" is, to a certain extent, a humble expression. An open reporter should start by confessing her ignorance and inviting people with real expertise to help her. "Reporter," Russbridge said when he launched the "Three Little Pigs" ad in 2012, "not the only expert in the world."

This is a strange statement, because journalists are not good at anything, except for the hope of becoming journalists in the end. The term "expert reporter" always contradicts itself. A certain amount of prior knowledge in the technical field will not be harmed, but the reporters who start reporting think they already know what it is, and by definition, they cannot engage in "journalism" work. Ignorant confession is always implicit: an event happened, or a reporter became interested in something, she needs to learn more about it to write about it, so she seeks out people who know and tries to talk to them. This is true whether the story is about murder, voting, or oil spill. Publicly seeking help from readers and social media followers is a useful new addition to the tools available to her, but it is neither reliable nor efficient; journalists still need to actively seek expertise and internal knowledge. When a reporter finds her knowledgeable sources, she accepts that her ignorance is essential. As the reporter's ignorance on the issue at hand diminishes, she must bear in mind the total ignorance of the average reader. Long before the advent of open news, the basic journalism skill was the ability to change from a state of not knowing something to a state of knowing something without forgetting what it was like before you knew it.

Alienation is real and can be traced back a long way. I think people will distinguish one large news organization from another, and they will see the difference between a reporter working for the Sun and a reporter working for the Guardian or LRB. I know from experience that although some people do this, many people don't. If a reporter cheats and lie, the rest will be tarnished: disillusionment. Before going back to the digital age, Sergeant Ian McKay, a soldier who died in an extraordinary military sacrifice in the Falkland Islands, was awarded the posthumous Victoria Cross. The Sun tried to interview his widow, Marika, but Unsuccessful, the latter turned to talk to the "Mirror". So this paper, edited by Kelvin MacKenzie, simply conducted an interview and published it under the label "WORLD EXCLUSIVE". Mrs. McKay did not go any further, but a reporter from The Observer complained to the press council, believing that the Sun had carried out a "sad and insensitive deception" against the public. This is fake news, big events, or, what used to be called, lying. In their book on the sun, stick to your punter! (2012), Chris Horrie and Peter Chippindale described what happened next:

Years later, a hacker went to the magazine to interview Mrs. McKay and asked her why she was so reluctant to complain. She reluctantly showed him a letter of apology from [the editor-in-chief of The Sun] and asked him if he still had a job. The hacker said he did. Mrs. McKay then asked if MacKenzie still had a job. Sometimes when the hacker answered him, the widow just looked at him. "Then you are here," she said.

In 2003, the New York Times discovered that one of the reporters, Jayson Blair, had been systematically falsifying elements of his story, plagiarizing, claiming that he had never been to places, and talking with him only on the phone Meet the people who have been. Once, he described the tobacco fields and cattle ranch that a family whose daughter was arrested in Iraq could see on the porch of their home in West Virginia. There is no such area; he has never been to that house. Unlike The Sun, The Times was shocked by Blair's deception, but when they read the story in the newspaper, the family did not complain, which made them feel frustrated and confused. In general, their expectations for journalism seem extremely low. The sister of the missing soldier said: "We just think it will be a one-off thing."

In the last few years of Rusbridger’s editing, a more extraordinary investigation was the series of articles by Rob Evans and Paul Lewis, which revealed how police officers can assume false identities. Penetrated into the British counter-cultural movement, so much that they formed long-term sexual relationships with activists. In October 2011, the Guardian lifted the veil of one of the police spies, Bob Lambert. This article was on the front page of the paper version, when the online version was all over the Internet. However, when he pretended to be an animal rights activist, the mother of his child did not see it. Eight months later, when she saw his photo in another newspaper, she discovered that the man who disappeared from her and her son's lives in 1987 was a police spy. "I don't read the Guardian," she told the New Yorker in 2014. "No one I know can read the Guardian."

As a traditional news organization, it is one thing to be humble in the face of the whole class's dissatisfaction with reporters. Another acceptance is that despite your global influence and good deeds in the fight to defend the public interest, it took a member of the public in your own backyard eight months to realize that you broke an important story, and This story just revealed the true identity of her child's father. It’s better to be humble to those who don’t listen than to hostile skeptics; the effort to find out what’s really happening in the world is not like realizing that in rare cases you do find that not everyone does Waiting eagerly to hear it is just as tiresome. This does not mean that the struggle is not worthwhile. It is just that if a more serious newsroom needs a certain degree of humility, it is to recognize the "us" of a single reader, the "us" of public interest news believers, and the "us" of the public as a whole. "Are three completely different "we". Even getting them in touch is an extension.

Editor London Review of Books, 28 Little Russell Street London, WC1A 2HN letter@lrb.co.uk Please provide your name, address and phone number.

The Editor London Review of Books 28 Little Russell Street London, WC1A 2HN letter@lrb.co.uk Please provide name, address and phone number

From 1991 to 2006, I regularly wrote articles for The Guardian as a freelancer, contractor, and employee.

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