“I think news is incredibly important to society and democracy,” Mark Zuckerberg told a group of editors and media executives in May. The Guardian and its sister newspaper, The Observer, had reported two months earlier that a Donald Trump-aligned analytics firm, Cambridge Analytica, used Facebook to target users with personalized political ads. The revelations fit neatly within a pattern of Facebook failing to police its platform on various fronts. After testifying before Congress on how it happened, Zuckerberg convened the gathering with journalists in Palo Alto as if to prove he believed in the type of reporting that brought the episode to light. At the same time, he didn’t suggest any way Facebook could protect it.

BREAKING NEWS: THE REMAKING OF JOURNALISM AND WHY IT MATTERS NOW by Alan Rusbridger Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 464 pp., $30.00

A decade of turmoil has left a weakened press vulnerable to political attacks, forced into ethical compromises, and increasingly outstripped by new forms of digital media. Deeply reported and scrupulously fact-checked stories now compete with click-bait, memes, bots, trolls, hyper-partisan writers, and fake news produced to rack up views on social platforms. Local news is vanishing as Facebook, Google, and increasingly Amazon dominate the advertising industry on which publications long relied. And national news outlets now grapple not only with how to recalibrate their businesses, but also whether to tweak their journalism to fit a media world in which they are the exception rather than the rule. The question of how to serve the public interest hangs in the balance.

Alan Rusbridger frames these developments as nothing short of a potential crisis for liberal democracy in his new book, Breaking News: The Remaking of Journalism and Why it Matters Now. Access to trustworthy information is a key feature of an open society, and the internet promised to further democratize it. But we are now drowning in information of varying quality and from unreliable sources. The resulting confusion threatens to upend the way we understand the world and to empower those who thrive in chaos. “We are, for the first time in modern history,” Rusbridger writes, “facing the prospect of how societies would exist without reliable news—at least as it used to be understood.”

He understands the stakes: He edited The Guardian as it made a Herculean attempt to morph from a mid-sized British newspaper to international standard-bearer for progressive news, and saw all of the obstacles. Rusbridger’s Guardian is instructive of the possibilities and limits of journalism in this world. He has seen how digital media can liberate new voices but also ravage the business models that used to support newsgathering. What remains unclear is just how many institutions like The Guardian can survive—and how often their civic mission and commercial interests will clash.

Rusbridger’s career, which began at the Cambridge Evening News in 1976, tracks closely with the fortunes of the media industry. The newspaper of 40 years ago enjoyed something of a regional monopoly in the distribution of what’s now known as “content.” Fat with classifieds for jobs, cars, and anything else now found on Craigslist, the daily print edition was sold to readers at a relatively low cover price; media companies made most of their money from advertisers.