Alan Rusbridger

Overview

Editor, The Guardian

Alan Rusbridger has been editor of the Guardian since 1995. He is editor-in-chief of Guardian News & Media, a member of the GNM and GMG Boards and a member of the Scott Trust, which owns the Guardian and the Observer.

Rusbridger's career began on the Cambridge Evening News, where he trained as a reporter before first joining the Guardian in 1979. He worked as a general reporter, feature writer and diary columnist before leaving to succeed Clive James and Julian Barnes as the Observer's TV critic.

He was made deputy editor in 1994, when he first started working on the paper's initial forays into digital publishing. As editor, he helped launch Guardian Unlimited - now guardian.co.uk - and, in 2004, was responsible for the paper's complete redesign and transformation into the European Berliner format. He oversaw the integration of the paper and digital operations, helping to build a website which today attracts more than 70 million unique visitors a month.

One of the top five global newspaper sites, it has regularly been voted the best newspaper website in the world. In 2008 the Guardian and the Observer merged some operations and, together with their joint website, moved to a new base in Kings Place, North London. During his editorship the paper has fought a number of high-profile battles over libel and press freedom, including cases involving Neil Hamilton, Jonathan Aitken, the Police Federation, Trafigura, freedom of information and Wikileaks.

The paper was nominated newspaper of the year five times between 1996 and 2006. Rusbridger has been named editor of the year three times.

Born in Zambia, he graduated from Cambridge University with a degree in English in 1976. He has been a visiting fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford and is and a visiting professor of history at Queen Mary's College, London and at Cardiff University.

A keen amateur pianist and clarinetist, Rusbridger was chair of the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain from 2004-2012, when the orchestra was awarded the Queen's Prize for Music. He was previously chair of the Photographers' Gallery in London. He is the author of three children's books, published by Penguin. He was the co-author, with Ronan Bennett, of the two-part BBC One drama, Fields of Gold. He's also written a full-length animation film script (Working Title films) and a play about Beethoven.

The Guardian Website