Alan Rusbridger

Alan Charles Rusbridger (born 29 December 1953) is a British journalist and editor of Prospect magazine.

He was formerly editor-in-chief of The Guardian and then principal of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford.

He stayed with the Evening News until 1979.

He then joined The Guardian as a reporter, and subsequently wrote the paper's diary column and later became a feature writer.

In November 1985, Rusbridger had a brief stint as a Royal reporter following the Prince and Princess of Wales around Melbourne.

Fascinated by gadgets, at this stage he was already using a Tandy word processor and an early (slow) modem to file stories back to London.

He left in 1986 to become TV critic of The Observer, then an entirely separate newspaper, before moving to America to be the Washington editor of the short-lived London Daily News in 1987.

After returning to The Guardian, he launched the "Weekend" supplement in 1988, followed by the paper's "G2" section.

He became features editor in 1994.

Rusbridger became editor-in-chief of The Guardian in 1995, having been a reporter and columnist earlier in his career.

Rusbridger was appointed as the editor of The Guardian by the Scott Trust in late January 1995 after a decisive vote of the National Union of Journalists chapel, management and trustees in an electoral college.

As editor, he defended the paper against a number of high-profile defamation suits, including those from the Police Federation and the Conservative MPs, Neil Hamilton and Jonathan Aitken.

In the case involving Hamilton and the lobbyist Ian Greer, he said: "They weren't going to fight us in the court so they tried to do it through the TV studio."

Rusbridger countered them by being available for TV interviews over three days to ensure that their version of events did not gain precedence.

Hamilton's case collapsed shortly before a court hearing, while Aitken was demonstrated to have perjured himself, and served a prison sentence as a result.

Seen early in his editorship as a modernising new broom, he commented in June 1997 shortly after the election of Tony Blair's first New Labour government that the "old" Guardian: "opposed lots of things the Tories did which we'd now think weren't terribly bad in retrospect ... I mean, a lot of the trade union stuff doesn't seem as horrendous now as it seemed at the time."

From around 1997, he oversaw the launch and development of the newspaper's website, initially known as Guardian Unlimited.

In September 2005, The Guardian responded to the tabloid re-launches of The Times and The Independent by moving from a broadsheet format to the "Berliner" format, which is common in the rest of Europe.

Rusbridger received £471,000 in pay and benefits in 2008–2009, but then volunteered to a series of pay cuts, bringing his revenue to £395,000 in fiscal year 2012.

He expanded the publishing bases of the paper, opening American and Australian editions.

The print edition of the newspaper still accounted for about 75% of the company's revenue around 2012.

In a profile of Rusbridger though, published in the New Statesman at the end of May 2012, former newspaper editor Peter Wilby cast doubt on whether Rusbridger's enthusiasm for online journalism, freely available without a paywall, and the large amount of money invested by the group, would ever gain a return or ensure the long-term survival of the newspaper.

As editor-in-chief, in August 2013 Rusbridger took the decision to destroy hard drives containing information leaked to The Guardian by Edward Snowden, rather than comply with a government demand to hand over the data.

An alternative action was agreed and in the presence of the authorities the drives were destroyed.

Rusbridger described performing the task as "slightly pointless": "Given that there were other copies, I saw no reason not to destroy this material ourselves."

Rather than cease publication of the Snowden material, Rusbridger transferred the editing operation to New York, sharing the material with The New York Times.

He believed that the US First Amendment protection would make it harder for the government to intervene.

The Guardian shared the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service with The Washington Post.

The Pulitzer committee praised The Guardian for its "revelation of widespread secret surveillance by the National Security Agency, helping through aggressive reporting to spark a debate about the relationship between the government and the public over issues of security and privacy".

Edward Snowden said his actions in leaking the documents that formed the basis of the reporting "would have been meaningless without the dedication, passion, and skill of these newspapers".

Rusbridger stood down from the post at the end of May 2015 and was succeeded by Katharine Viner.

From 2015 to 2021, Rusbridger was principal of Lady Margaret Hall in the University of Oxford.

He was appointed chair of the university's Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism in 2016.

Until May 2016, he was a member of the board of Guardian News and Media, of the main board of the Guardian Media Group and of the Scott Trust, which owns The Guardian and The Observer, of which he was executive editor.

In 2020, Rusbridger was announced as one of the first members of the Oversight Board created by Facebook, with his appointment as the incoming editor of Prospect magazine announced in July 2021.

Rusbridger was born in Lusaka, Northern Rhodesia, a British protectorate (now Zambia).

He is the son of B. E. ( Wickham) and G. H. Rusbridger, the director of education of Northern Rhodesia.

When Rusbridger was five, the family returned to Britain and he was educated at Lanesborough Prep School, Guildford, where he was also a chorister at Guildford Cathedral, and Cranleigh School, a boys' public (independent and fee-paying) school in Surrey.

At Magdalene College, Cambridge, he read English Literature.

During the vacations of his first two years at university, he worked for the Cambridge Evening News as an intern, and accepted a job offer from the newspaper after graduation.