“There were at least two occasions when we were going to press on a Thursday, not knowing who the Prime Minister would be on the Friday.”

Alan Rusbridger is an award-winning journalist and editor of the current affairs publication Prospect Magazine.

Formerly editor-in-chief of The Guardian, Rusbridger led the newspaper to the 2014 Pulitzer Prize and was at the heart of their ground-breaking decision to publish the WikiLeaks papers.

In this Spotlight On piece, we delve deeper into a truly fascinating career, take a look at Prospect’s plans, and why independent press regulation is so important to them.

I’ve always enjoyed reading it and I think it does two things that are quite needed in the world at the moment. – The first is that we’re at a moment of great polarisation in society and media and I think trying to create a magazine that is neither of the left nor the right, but can treat both positions with respect, is needed.

“There were at least two occasions when we were going to press on a Thursday, not knowing who the Prime Minister would be on the Friday.”

The second is that we live in a time of hamster wheel speed and declining attention span where everything is shorter, shallower, quicker and more instantaneous. I think it’s just good to have some media outlets that are slower, more considered with a scope for greater depths, nuance and complexity. So if I can achieve both of those things at Prospect I’d be pleased.

I think whistleblowing is essential to journalism and that unofficial and unauthorised briefings are the heart blood of good journalism. We know that people often feel constrained when they have to say things officially and on-the-record, and, as journalists, we depend on people who are willing to take risks to say things that aren’t authorised, but which may be more truthful.

I think it’s always been hard. I think whistleblowers have often paid a heavy price for their acts of conscience. But I think what’s become harder is that the technology for detecting whistleblowing has become much more sophisticated and we’re all being surveilled in everything we do electronically.

So I think it’s much harder for journalists and sources to develop relationships which they can be sure are confidential and I think that’s a big problem for journalism these days.

It’s been interesting. There have been other outlets, notably Tortoise, which, as the name implies, is about being slower and more considered.

Before I left the Guardian, we had a slow department where people could detach themselves from the regular news and make more phone calls, read more literature, read books and think about things.

I do think that’s really necessary because the alternative is you get drawn into this vortex of whatever’s happening on Twitter or WhatsApp or whatever is happening in the moment. Some of that is inevitable. But I do think you need people who are able to do the opposite.

Last month, we had a very long piece by Jonathan Powell, who was involved in the Good Friday agreement, talking about how the Ukraine war is going to end. Now, his very first sentence is along the lines of ‘this is not going to happen immediately, but it is a question that everyone has to start thinking about at some point’. I think all wars end in negotiation of some sort, and we have to work out what our relationship with Russia is going to be over the next 30 years. So that’s a piece that isn’t in the immediate news cycle, but is tremendously important.

“It’s much harder for journalists and sources to develop relationships which they can be sure are confidential and I think that’s a big problem for journalism these days.”

In the last week, we’ve published a 4000-word piece by David Normington, who was the permanent secretary to the Home Office, saying ‘look, the headlines are all about small boats. But that’s a sort of relatively tiny bit of the immigration picture, and you can only really solve this if you think of the whole picture’. It’s a tremendously wise and humane piece about how to think about immigration and he’s had the experience of having dealt with it himself.

It’s quite rare that voices of experience are given space to say, ‘look, this is complex, but it’s doable.’ It’s a mile away from PMQs and the sort of cut and thrust of who can do what to own the Twittersphere or to get headlines in the newspapers, which is fine, but it’s not necessarily something that’s going to lead to good policy. So I think you absolutely need something that is calmer, more considered and likely to lead to better outcomes.

I’ve always thought that social media is a great moment of revolution. That’s kind of obvious, but I think we sometimes forget it, that two billion people who didn’t have a voice have, for the first time in history, been allowed to speak.

I was in Oxford recently for the annual Reuters lecture, which was given by a Nicaraguan editor who’s in exile, and there was also a Kenyan editor there. When you ask them about the role of social media, it is their lifeblood and their lifeline, because it’s the only way that ordinary people and dissidents can get their message heard in a time when the mainstream press has been clamped down on.

So, I do think, before we sort of weigh-in to say how awful these companies are, we have to acknowledge that there is something very precious there. Now, clearly, there are very problematic things which come with allowing two billion people the opportunity to speak and that’s a very new problem. It’s a very urgent and serious problem. But you have to balance the problems with the great goods and the opportunities that have come through this digital age.

I thought we should be regulated. I took a fairly active role in giving evidence to and trying to inform the Leveson Inquiry, which itself came about as a result of -The Guardian’s reporting into the phone hacking episodes of the early 2000s.

So having decided that we should be regulated, it made logical sense to join the regulator that most closely matched what Leveson recommended.

The first thing was that it was quite testing, editing a monthly magazine, in which there were three different Prime Minister’s, and four different Chancellors. So there were at least two occasions when we were going to press on a Thursday, not knowing who the Prime Minister would be on a Friday. That business of trying to remain rooted in the news, while also thinking two or three months ahead, was quite testing.

“We’re at a moment of great polarisation in society and media and I think trying to create a magazine that is neither of the left nor the right, but can treat both positions with respect, is needed.”

But I think I personally am getting better at that business of trying to look at my crystal ball and think, ‘well, what’s going to be interesting and important in two, three, or four months time’.

There’s a very good, keen, enthusiastic team here and we’ve just recruited a CEO from The Economist who is fantastic. We’re sorting out some of the technological problems, which meant that we weren’t as visible on Google and other social media platforms.

It’s been a year of doing quite a lot of bread and butter stuff. But I think this is the year when we will begin to take off.

I have described what I think Prospect should be and what I think the need for Prospect is. So the main goal is just to do that even better and to get better known.

There is a tiny number of people who are aware of Prospect and we’ve just got to get it better known, because once you can get it into people’s hands, they love it. But it is a struggle to get attention, particularly when we have technological problems, which means that Google wasn’t really finding us and in the 21st century, you can’t afford to be without Google.

Alan Rusbridger was Editor in Chief of The Guardian from 1995-2015. He is currently editor of Prospect Magazine and Chair of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. Until 2021 he was Principal of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford.

During his time at The Guardian, both he and the paper won numerous awards, including the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service Journalism. The Guardian grew from a printed paper with a circulation of 400,000 to a leading digital news organisation with 150m browsers a month around the world. He launched now-profitable editions in Australia and the US as well as a membership scheme which now has 1m Guardian readers paying for content.

He was born in Zambia, was educated at Cambridge and lives in London. He is the co-author of the BBC drama, Fields of Gold. He is a keen amateur musician and the author of Play it Again. His memoir of journalism and its future, Breaking News, was published in 2018. He is a member of the Facebook Oversight Board. His latest book, News and How to Use it, was published in 2020.