Alan Rusbridger, senior editor of the Guardian, addressed an audience of journalists at Harvard.
Corporate Social Responsibility and Newspapers
From a speech given at Harvard on October 14, 2006.
I'm very honoured to be giving this lunchtime talk to such a distinguished group of American journalists and academics.
Alex Jones wrote me a very nice letter back in August inviting me to speak about how the Guardian ran itself and wondering whether there were any lessons for the more commercial environment in which most American media work.
I was reminded of the centenary history of the Manchester Guardian, published in 1921, which extended to an American edition. The great editor CP Scott - who had been at the helm since 1875 but I don't think ever made it to these shores - wrote an introduction to this edition in which he wrote.
"It seems such a friendly thing to have an American Edition and that it should be taken for granted that quite an appreciable number of American citizens should be interested in the life and development of a single English newspaper."
I feel rather the same today - pleasantly surprised that there should be a modest amount of friendly interest in what we get up to at the Guardian. I hope some of the themes I'm going to talk about today - which are about accountability, transparency and opening an editorial process up to a certain amount of independent challenge - have some wider resonances.
At the heart of what I want to explore today is what it means to run a newspaper on the sort of ethical lines we urge everyone else to abide by in public and corporate life. What does "corporate social responsibility" mean in terms of a media organisation? How would you measure it, and why does it matter? And is any of this important given the other issues we're discussing this weekend?
I should begin by explaining a bit about the Guardian - the story of how we do things doesn't mean much without understanding how we got here.
The paper is now in its 185th year: it currently sells just under 400k copies a day in the UK and is the biggest British newspaper on the web, with nearly 13million unique users a month.
In the past two years it's twice been voted the best newspaper website in the world and, somewhat to our surprise, has at least as many, if not more, web readers in the USA than the LA Times.
That more than four million Americans should have stumbled on us without us spending a cent in advertising is rather intriguing, which is why we recently appointed Mike Kinsley as our American Editor with a view to seeing if he can find another four million.
The paper's origins lie in the Peterloo massacre of August 1819, when troops rode into a peaceful crowd of Manchester protestors who had been demanding an extension of the vote, By the end of the day 11 members of the crowd had been killed and 560 unarmed civilians injured, a great many of them seriously, Among those locked up that evening was the sole reporter who witnessed the savagery, a certain Mr Tyas of the London Times.
There was a great fear that, with the only independent journalist out of circulation, the first version of events would be the official one - written by the very magistrates who had unleashed the murder on the crowd. But a man called John Edward Taylor wrote his own account, which he sent to London by the night coach and which appeared within 48 hours - and which was never overtaken by the so-called official version.
Inspired by what he'd done, Taylor decided to found a newspaper in Manchester. He called it the Manchester Guardian. The first issue appeared in 1821
(and, incidentally, included a short announcement of the death of Napoleon.) Shortly afterwards Taylor married a woman called Sophia Russell Scott. Sophia's nephew was CP Scott, who at the age of 25 became editor and remained in charge of - and owner of - the paper for an astonishing 57 years, dying in 1932.
Scott's son, Edward, took over as editor, but in his first year was tragically killed in a boating accident while on Lake Windermere with his son Richard, who is still alive today. The threat of a double set of death duties placed the newspaper in some jeopardy and, in an act of supreme selflessness, the Scott family set up a trust to own the Manchester Guardian, to ensure its independence and to enable it to live on in perpetuity.
And so we move to the present day.
continued:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alan-rusbridger/corporate-social-responsi_b_32081.html
