Rusbridger’s ‘Messianic gleam’ for the net

Posted by Martin Stabe on 2 May 2006 at 12:26
Tags: Guardian, Journalism, Online

Speaking with the Arabic paper Asharq Alawsat this weekend, Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger explains the origins of his paper’s enthusiasm for the Internet:

Back in 1993, Carolyn McCall who is the managing director and I got involved with a magazine called Wire, which is a kind of bible for the internet and was published over here for a while. I made a couple of trips to America in the early nineties and came back with a kind of Messianic gleam in my eye and told others about this extraordinary thing that was going on there, so both of us came at it independently. We did not make the mistake of going in at a ridiculous level. We did not do what others did, shoot it and then have to cut back. We went in at a reasonable level. Also, we did not simply replicate the paper online, I think that’s what a lot of people do, they just put the paper up and treated it as though it’s the same medium. We did not do that.

The man with the “messianic gleam” also told Asharq Alawsat that he isn’t sure whether newspapers are doomed. He’s keeping an eye on the emergence of e-paper, though: “If somebody invents plastic paper, which I think has happened already, and you find something that is readable in sunlight, has long battery power and is refreshable then that spells the end of [newspapers] sooner. If not then [newspapers] I think will be round for many years yet but the economic model that supports this will change.”

Tags: Guardian, Journalism, Online