OVERVIEW
A timeline of the events covered by the book, which chronicles the digital revolution that swept through newspapers between 1995 and 2015. The pink boxes at the bottom were some of the bigger stories we wrote. The light green boxes show the birth of the West Coast disrupters, some of whom would come close to destroying an economic model for news which had existed for the best part of 200 years.
The story of a revolution
How do we know any more what is true and what isn’t? We are living through the greatest communication revolution since Gutenberg in which falsehood regularly seems to overwhelm truth. In Breaking News Alan Rusbridger offers an urgent and agenda-setting examination of the past, present and future of the press, and the forces menacing its freedom.
The news media have been disrupted by huge and fast-moving changes. The growth of social media and with it the ability of billions of people to publish has created a vast amount of unreliable and false news which now competes with, and sometimes drowns, more established forms of journalism. The President of the United States regularly lies to the public and brands his critics ‘fake’. Politicians openly rubbish the views of ‘so-called experts’. Where can we look for reliable, verifiable sources of news and information? What does all this mean for democracy? And what will the future hold?
Reflecting on his twenty years as editor of the Guardian; and his experience of breaking some of the most significant news stories of our time, including the Edward Snowden revelations, phone-hacking, Wikileaks and the Keep it in the Ground campaign, Rusbridger answers these questions and offers a stirring defence of why quality journalism matters now more than ever.