Since 1995, newspapers have seen massive disruption. Circulation plummeted. Ad revenue fell off a cliff. Journalists were laid off. Papers closed. Reading habits were radically changed by revolutions in digital and mobile technology.
The key question after this chaotic era has to be: Has the "product" gotten better or worse? Better, I say, but then I worked as a newspaper editor during those years.
A reader seeking news of the 1994 midterm elections would have bought the next day's paper for roundups and partial returns about that year's Republican Revolution.
That seems so much less robust than how newshounds could access election coverage this November — via live blogs, continual story and photo updates on mobile devices and laptops, videos, Twitter headlines, scrolling comments, links to raw voting data. While some readers would pay for this, many would access it gratis. Only then, and only maybe, would they buy a print paper the next day.
In "Breaking News," Alan Rusbridger, who became editor of the respected liberal British daily the Guardian in 1995, surveys the tumultuous two decades that led to the present moment. He is a well-informed, earnest and entertaining (if long-winded) guide, armed with both statistics and anecdotes.
His narrative is in some ways veddy British — Rusbridger worked in a unique Fleet Street ecosystem that included as many as a dozen giant daily national papers, from highbrow, "eat-your-peas" broadsheets to giant-headline, Rupert Murdoch-controlled tabloids known as "red-tops." The biggest papers, the Sun and the Mirror, edged toward an astonishing daily circulation of 4 million copies in the 1980s. These papers were cash cows for owners and employed thousands of journalists.
Rusbridger's paper is subsidized by a trust that shielded it from quarterly economic pressures of a strictly market-driven product. To this day, it is one of the rare papers with no mandatory paywall for its online version. Still, each challenge that the Guardian stared down also was encountered in equal measure by every U.S. newspaper, including the one you are reading.
Tech innovation hit journalism in ceaseless waves, from the earliest days of the World Wide Web through rollouts of such digital behemoths as MySpace (remember?), Craigslist (which helped kill lucrative classifieds that plumped newspaper bottom lines for decades), Facebook, Google, YouTube, Twitter and Wikipedia.
