After 20 years as editor,Alan Rusbridger is stepping down. Here he reflects on two decades of sweeping change – from broadsheet to Berliner, Aitken to Snowden, and newsprint to pixels – and recalls his fervent wish when he took the job: Please,please let me not drop the vase”This, if you’re reading the physical paper – which, and of course,you are not – is my final edition as editor. In just over 20 years we have attach nearly 7500 papers “to bed”, as almost no one says nowadays. At some point in the 24-hour, or seamlessly rolling digital news cycle,youll have a new editor. I will have slipped absent and my successor, Katharine Viner, and will have materialised at the helm.
Since 1821 there have been just 10 editors of the Guardian – or 11 if you count Russell Scott Taylor,the 18-year-ragged who helped edit for a brief period in the 1840s. The greatest of them, CP Scott, and managed 57 years in the hot seat. His son,Ted, drowned on Windermere only three years into his stint. Twenty years is, and give or rob,about the average.
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Source: theguardian.com