Wolff: Snowden effect hits 'Guardian'

Michael Wolff | USA TODAY

Major journalistic scoops are judged by their impact on society at large, but they can also impact with unintended effects the news organizations that pursue them.

With the Edward Snowden revelations about NSA spying in 2013, Britain's Guardian newspaper and its U.S. Web presence became a major player in American journalism. But the selection of a new editor Friday at the Guardian — Katharine Viner — can be read as, in part, a deeply equivocal response on the part of the paper's staff, with its unusual power in the process of selecting a new editor, to the Snowden story. (Disclosure: I have written for the Guardian for many years.)

Alan Rusbridger, the Guardian's long-time editor and eminence, and the face of the Snowden story — and, too, of the paper's WikiLeaks revelations — announced his coming retirement late last year. Rusbridger, with his grown-up Harry Potter look, is regarded as the Guardian's heart and soul, even something of a cult leader. But the succession fight startlingly turned against him and his favored choice to lead the company.

The Guardian occupies a unique place in journalism. Its original owners, the Scott family, endowed a trust to support the paper and to shield its left-wing orientation from day-to-day commercial pressure. The Scott Trust is now worth approximately $1.4 billion. But losses at the paper, with a circulation under 200,000 — and a staff of more than 800 — have run as high as $100 million a year (they are currently about $45 million). And its costly international digital business is still a long way from supporting itself.

The Snowden story, in addition to its journalistic significance, was a key part of the effort to extend the Guardian brand to the U.S., where the company has pinned much of its hopes for the future.

While the Snowden story was hugely successful journalistically, winning a Pulitzer Prize and commanding the attention of other news organizations, little of that success seemed to benefit the rest of the organization. For one thing, the new U.S. operation, which was supposed to develop a unique U.S. product and have considerable independence from London, became, with Snowden, closely overseen by London managers. At the same time, the London newsroom felt downgraded, both in stature and resources, by the importance now accorded New York.

While layoffs in London were accompanied by a hiring binge in New York, the New York office also saw great churn among its staff, many of whom felt sidelined by the emphasis on Snowden.

The Snowden story was owned by a small circle at the paper: primarily, Rusbridger, who became its most public face; Janine Gibson, the Rusbridger acolyte with a reputation for sharp elbows imported from London to run the New York office; and Glenn Greenwald, the freelancer who had brought the story to the Guardian (and who discontinued his relationship with the paper shortly after the story broke). What's more, the story, which Guardian management believed would be a financial boon, attracted little advertising revenue and instead became a cost center — and other parts of the paper had to absorb the hit.

There developed, too, a sense of journalistic queasiness around Snowden, difficult to express at the party-line Guardian. Questioning Snowden's retreat to Russia and his protection by Vladimir Putin was internally verboten. There were Gibson's efforts to carefully monitor staff tweets, making sure Guardian journalists toed the line in support of Snowden and Greenwald. Then there was Rusbridger's interview with Snowden in July, which made Rusbridger seem, to many, like something of a fawning groupie — and left a sense of embarrassment among many staffers.

What's more, causing organizational tremors, Gibson, who'd worked with The New York Times on shared aspects of the Snowden story, hoped to jump to a job there, it emerged in the aftermath of Times executive editor Jill Abramson's dismissal. (Current Times executive editor Dean Baquet's dislike of Gibson, and her handling of the Times-Guardian Snowden relationship, was so intense he threatened to quit if she were hired.)

Last summer Gibson returned to London, as, virtually everyone understood, Rusbridger's designated heir. But then a funny thing happened with Rusbridger's retirement announcement. While it might be hard criticize the Snowden story in the context of the Guardian's lock-step leftist politics, in the context of the paper's fractious internal politics, Snowden became part of the subtext of discontent.

Guardian tradition provides for a direct vote by the staff for a new editor — a vote Rusbridger himself had handily won in 1995 — and open electioneering.

Gibson's pitch was to wholly align herself with Rusbridger and Snowden — proudly promising more of the same. Kath Viner, who had taken over for Gibson in New York and who was generally thought to be not quite "Guardianista" enough for the top job, pitched decidedly against Gibson and, in a sense, against Snowden, representing the strengths of the paper's features section and culture coverage. Another candidate, Emily Bell, who left a several-decade career at the Guardian in 2010 for a post at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, made a case for ethics, which in part could be seen as an unspoken challenge to both Snowden and WikiLeaks. (Wolfgang Blau, director of digital strategy, was the token man in the race.)

But in a small and shocking revolution — something like a North London Spring — the vote went resoundingly against Gibson and, by inference, the Rusbridger legacy. Viner came in first and Bell second, each in their own way promising a softer, gentler, less doctrinaire Guardian.

In the final weeks, Ian Katz — once the heir apparent who, in a dispute with Rusbridger, left in 2013 to head the BBC's Newsnight show (and who, holding an outside job, sat out the election) — also reemerged as something of an anti-organization candidate.

The Guardian remains an insular place with much more left unsaid than said. But it's hard not to understand, that a profound backlash had taken place in Guardian culture, and that the Scott Trust, which Rusbridger will now chair and which has final say over the appointment, had no choice but to accept a quiet rejection of Rusbridger and, as well, the ultimate Snowden effect.