Alan Rusbridger, I salute you
On my mom’s very strong recommendation, I read the text of a speech given recently by Alan Rusbridger in the UK. He’s editor of the Guardian, and the speech’s title is a wonderful tease:
“Does journalism exist?”
As I made my way through the text—it’s quite long—I kept selecting a section to blockquote… and then finding an even better one three grafs down. Forget it; just read the whole thing.
I’m not sure that it’s exactly the dictionary definition of magisterial, but I use the word to mean comprehensive, authoritative, and fluent. That last one is important; I don’t think you can be magisterial without using language really, really well.
Rusbridger’s speech is magisterial.
If somebody was brand-new to journalism, or brand-new to planet earth, I’d hand them a printout of this speech, and I’d be pretty confident that they would emerge ready to participate in what’s next. It’s a wonderful, balanced, meaty piece of work.
This speech is fantastic. Thanks for recommending it!
Thanks for the recommendation, definitely a great read. It got me thinking about paywalls/micropayments, and had some thoughts that might be interesting about a system that might work, but probably a bit too long/off-topic to copy-paste here.