BREAKING NEWS

The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters Now

By Alan Rusbridger

440 pp.  Farrar, Straus & Giroux.  $30. 

A deathwatch beetle is an insidious insect, eating away at furniture or homes, capable of destroying them if left undetected. “ The structures look sound,” Alan Rusbridger writes, “but have been hollowed out from within and, if you’re really unlucky, turn to dust.” 

The destructive beetle is the dark metaphor conjured by Rusbridger, the former editor of the British daily The Guardian, to describe the impact of Craigslist on the newspaper industry.  He recalls the day a colleague returned to Fleet Street from a trip to the United States, carrying news of the free advertising site’s booming success and the resulting decline in paid newspaper classifieds, long a revenue life force.  The Craigslist website “looked like nothing” and had “no editorial content at all,” but here was a publishing revolution not playing a journalist’s game.  Underscoring the point was a slide accompanying his colleague’s report: an image of The New York Times’s new 52-story Manhattan skyscraper alongside a photo of Craigslist’s San Francisco headquarters — a frame house with room for the staff’s 18 desks. 

Rusbridger’s 20 years as editor of The Guardian — 1995-2015 — parallel a period of dramatic transformation in the newspaper industry, arguably the most dramatic since the invention of the printing press.  The staggering changes are illustrated by his efforts to explain the predigital publishing cycle to an Oxford class of phone-dependent 18-year-olds.  He draws a set of stick figures starting with a reporter working on a manual typewriter and ending, 18 stick figures later, with carriers delivering a newspaper to subscribers’ front doors. “ The group look as if I have been relating how cave dwellers created fire by rubbing dry twigs together.”