Alan Rusbridger was Editor of the Guardian, and Editor-in-Chief of Guardian News & Media, between 1995 and 2015. He is one of the world’s leading thinkers on journalism and its transformation as it faces its challenging and yet-to-be-worked-out future in the digital age.
Mr. Rusbridger is a member of the Scott Trust, which owns the Guardian and the Observer, and will take over as its Chair in 2016. In December 2014, the Fellows of Lady Margaret Hall (LMH), a pioneering college at the University of Oxford, elected him to be the next Principal, a position he will take up in October 2015.
He is currently spending a month in Chennai, teaching a course at the Asian College of Journalism (ACJ) as a Distinguished Visiting Professor.
Towards the end of his editorship of the Guardian, Mr. Rusbridger launched a climate change campaign, “Keep It in the Ground,” in the newspaper, pointing out that “real change can only follow by citizens informing themselves and applying pressure.” The campaign presents a major new series in the newspaper and calls on big players like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Wellcome Trust to remove their investments from the top 200 fossil fuel companies and any commingled funds.
(Links: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/mar/06/climate-change-guardian-threat-to-earth-alan-rusbridger & http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/mar/16/everything-you-wanted-to-ask-about-the-guardians-climate-change-campaign )
Mr. Rusbridger's career began on the Cambridge Evening News, where he trained as a reporter before first joining the Guardian in 1979. He worked as a general reporter, feature writer and diary columnist before leaving to succeed Clive James and Julian Barnes as the Observer's TV critic.
In 1987 he worked as the Washington correspondent of the London Daily News before returning to the Guardian as a feature writer.
He moved from writing to editing the following year, launching the Guardian Weekend magazine and the paper's G2 section. He was made Deputy Editor in 1994, when he first started working on the paper's initial forays into digital publishing.
As Editor, Mr. Rusbridger helped launch Guardian Unlimited – now theguardian.com – and, in 2004, was responsible for the paper's complete redesign and transformation into the European Berliner format. He oversaw the integration of the paper and digital operations, helping to build a website which today attracts visits from more than 100 million unique browsers a month. Now the world's second largest serious newspaper website, it has regularly been voted the best newspaper website in the world.
In 2008 the Guardian and the Observer merged some operations and, together with their joint website, moved to a new base in Kings Place, North London. U.S. and Australian editions were subsequently launched. In September 2014 the paper announced an innovative new membership scheme, to be based near the paper's headquarters in King's Cross.
During Mr. Rusbridger’s editorship the paper has fought a number of high-profile battles over libel and press freedom, including cases involving Neil Hamilton, Jonathan Aitken, the Police Federation, Trafigura, freedom of information and WikiLeaks. The paper's coverage of phone hacking led to the Leveson Inquiry into press standards and ethics.
In 2013 the paper broke the story of how Edward Snowden, a former National Security Agency analyst, had turned whistleblower. Over several weeks the Guardian led the global coverage of the Snowden revelations, leading to changes in the law and numerous debates in the U.S. Congress, the U.K. parliament, and legislatures around the world. Guardian U.S. won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for public service as well as the Paul Foot award and the George Polk award for its coverage.
The paper's coverage of the WikiLeaks documents, phone-hacking and Snowden stories led to the announcement of three major Hollywood movies, either made or in production – by Steven Spielberg, George Clooney, and Oliver Stone.
The Guardian was nominated newspaper of the year five times between 1996 and 2014. Mr. Rusbridger has been named Editor of the Year thrice. Over the past year he has won the Liberty Human Rights Award, the European Press Prize, and the Ortega y Gasset award and has been honoured by CUNY, Columbia, Oslo, and Syracuse Universities.
Born in Zambia, Mr. Rusbridger graduated from Magdalene College Cambridge University, with a degree in English in 1976. He was a visiting fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford, and is a visiting professor of history at Queen Mary's College, London, and Cardiff University. He has honorary doctorates from Lincoln, Oslo, and Kingston Universities.
He gave the James Cameron Lecture in 1997, the Anthony Sampson Lecture in 2009, the Hugh Cudlipp and Andrew Olle Lectures in 2010, and the Benjamin Franklin Lecture in 2014.
A keen amateur pianist and clarinettist, Mr. Rusbridger has been chair of the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain and the Photographers' Gallery in London.
Play It Again: An Amateur Against the Impossible , his critically acclaimed book published in 2013, is the captivating story of one of the world’s leading newspaper editors learning to play Chopin’s Ballade No. 1 in G minor against a backdrop of phone hacking and dramatic WikiLeaks revelations.
Mr. Rusbridger is the author of three children's books, published by Penguin. He was the co-author, with Ronan Bennett, of the two-part BBC One drama, Fields of Gold . Additionally, he has written a full-length animation film script and a play about Beethoven.
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