From the ACLU, this is at Liberty.

I'm Emerson Sykes, a staff attorney here at the ACLU and your host.

On today's show, we have Alan Rusbridger, former editor of The Guardian.

He's here with us to discuss the future of journalism in the digital age and some of the

most important moments in his career, including the audacious decision to publish

Edward Snowden's revelations back in 2013. In his new book, Breaking News, The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters Now,

Russ Bridger fights for the soul of journalism in the social media age. We'll hear from Alan what has

been lost in this information revolution and what has been gained. We'll also discuss how the

U.S. Constitution protects investigative journalism and what it's like to work in the

UK where the First Amendment doesn't exist.

Alan, thanks very much for joining us today.

Welcome to the podcast.

Very happy to be here.

One of the major themes in your book that I wanted to start out with is the contrast that

you draw between horizontal and vertical news dissemination patterns. Can you

describe what you mean by this? Yeah, well, for most of history, certainly until 10 years ago,

and certainly for the last two or three hundred years, there was a thing called a printing press.

And if you own one of those, then that gave you an extraordinary position in society. You had an

almost unique method of distributing news and people had to buy your product and that gave you

a very marked sense of what your role was in society as somebody who had something that other people didn't have,

and you would hand it almost literally down to them,

and they would hand their money up to you.

...