Journalism is undergoing the most profound changes since Gutenberg’s printing press, said Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian, a paper which has seen significant digital growth and now has a digital audience close to 15 times larger than its print one.

Now anyone can publish, and we must not fight that trend, rather, we must face up to it and establish what we as journalists can do better, he said. Rusbridger was speaking at the Paris-based Sciences Po university on 7 September.

“What is journalism? What is the difference between what these people can produce and what we can?”

Many journalists are reluctant to consider contributions from readers or bloggers as serious competition, Rusbridger said, but it is dangerous to be in denial about how the publishing world is changing, he stressed. It is not just individuals who are contributing to the media landscape: from NGOs to supermarkets, from opera houses to TV stations – all are becoming online media suppliers.

The power of a media organisation is to be able to harness the intelligence of the web: you can tap into this by being part of the web, rather than just on the web, he said. “You can be more powerful if instead of ignoring other people, you bring them into what you're doing,” he continued.

“The future is open,” said Andrew Miller, CEO of the Guardian Media Group, at WAN-IFRA’s Digital Media Europe conference in London.

It’s not just journalism that has an open future: there are fundamental changes going on in many areas as a result of new technologies, he pointed out. Open is a theme in science with the genome project, for example, or in computing technology with Linux, academic publishing with the Wellcome trust’s efforts, and even in governments as they embrace open data.

What does this mean for journalism? It doesn’t mean that the voice of the journalist is less relevant, Miller emphasized, but it means that you can supplement this strong voice with other views.

The Guardian’s Open Newslist is an important experiment in open journalism, Miller said. “We encourage people to interact with it, and we are also trying a live blog of what we are discussing during the day.” Information from this was crucial for a recent Falkland Islands story, he added.

Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger answered readers’ questions about open journalism in a live chat on the paper’s website this afternoon, following the paper’s ‘Open Weekend,’ which aimed to put the principle of open journalism fully into practice.

Rusbridger lists the paper’s ten principles of open journalism: essentially it is journalism which embraces information from others and enters into a dialogue with the wider world. 

The issues he addressed in the chat include:

Transparency

Rusbrider said that the paper does already give background data in the form of facts and figures in some cases so that readers can make their own judgments. But “we could, and should, do more, he continued. “I've always been keen on the idea of footnotes. Difficult in print, easier on the web. Ditto links.”

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