Breaking News: The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters Now

Alan Rusbridger — editor of the Guardian for two decades, the journalist who oversaw the Snowden revelations and the phone-hacking exposés — reflects on the transformation of journalism in the digital age and what it means for democracy. The book is partly memoir, partly institutional history, and partly a sustained argument about the relationship between independent journalism and democratic accountability — and about why the collapse of the economic model that sustained investigative journalism is a democratic emergency as serious as the disinformation crisis it has enabled.

For practitioners in the information environment, the book is essential for understanding why the structural conditions that make effective counter-disinformation so difficult are not going to be resolved by technical means. The decline of the local newspaper, the collapse of advertising revenue, the reduction of newsroom capacity for investigation and verification — these are the conditions that make influence operations effective, because they are the conditions that have eliminated the journalistic infrastructure for holding false claims to account. Rusbridger writes with the authority of someone who built one of the world's most important journalism institutions and watched the economic basis for that institution erode.