The Observer strike raises questions we should all be worried about

In a Nevada courtroom, a family drama finally spilled out into public. On the streets of north London, hundreds of editorial staff walked out on strike. Look closely, and you can see a story of two newspaper giants, separated by more than a century, with very different ideas of what journalism should be.

Let’s start in Nevada, and you’d need a heart of stone not to laugh. It was after the death of Logan Roy, the megalomaniac old monster in the 2023 TV series Succession, that three of Rupert Murdoch’s children started thinking about a PR strategy for when their own father might meet his final deadline.

James, Elisabeth and Prudence got together at Claridge’s, provoking a spasm of paranoia in his fourth child, Lachlan, who’s doubtless also gorged on the endless internecine intrigues in this parallel successional universe. He convinced himself that his siblings were plotting against him, and so persuaded his dad to take revenge. Kendall Roy meets King Lear.

Thus a court action, reported this week in the New York Times, which any fictional writers’ room would surely rule out as too outlandish. For what the real-life Logan Roy was attempting to achieve was power beyond the grave. Not even Citizen Kane tried that.

Not satisfied with his Zeus-like political influences across three continents for seven decades, Rupert Murdoch now wishes to continue his control in the afterlife. The opposite of nunc dimittis.

What most obsesses Rupert, 93, is that his media interests – especially Fox News – should continue to back conservative causes even once he’s gone. He trusts Lachlan to bang the drum in eternity, but fears the others have gone a bit woke. Lachlan dubbed the legal action “Project Family Harmony”. Perhaps he has a sense of humour.

The entire Murdoch enterprise has been about money and power. There will be billions for the children to share when Rupert finally dies, but the Nevada judge firmly knocked on the head any ambitions for posthumous influence. Rupert has said he will appeal, though time is not necessarily on his side.

So much for the Murdoch family. Now let me introduce you to the less-celebrated Scott family. CP Scott was editor of the Manchester Guardian for a remarkable 57 years and, by the time he died in 1932, he was also its owner.

Scott lived modestly, cycling to work each day to oversee the editorial columns in particular, and had no ambitions to amass worldly riches. When both he and his son Ted died in quick succession the family was faced with the prospect of crippling double death duties.

The Scott children could have sold up, making themselves multi-millionaires – there was no shortage of press barons, including Lord Beaverbrook, who would willingly have snapped up the paper – but instead they established a trust and essentially gave the paper away.

The Scott Trust, established in 1936, has only one remit: to make sure that The Guardian, as it now is, continues to publish in perpetuity “in the same spirit as heretofore”. What does that mean? It means understanding, and being true to, the liberal and progressive ethos of the paper. But it is also about how the paper is run. The two are indivisible.

Scott was quite clear that his paper should have a “higher and more exacting function” than making profits – and said explicitly that he wouldn’t have stayed as editor if the opposite had been the case.

To him, it followed that the journalists, not the business managers, should run the show – the editor “just an inch or two in advance”. For years, it has been the tradition that the daily editorial cycle begins with a conference, open to anyone, where staff can debate the issues of the moment. Out of that argument – rather from than any diktat from above – the newspaper (and its digital equivalent) is formed.

In many respects, then, it is the opposite of the Murdoch empire.

And yet this week, and last, Guardian and Observer journalists have been out on strike. Angry letters to the Scott Trust have been penned by virtually every Guardian and Observer journalist you’ve heard of, and many you haven’t. Foreign correspondents are furious. Former Observer editors are beside themselves. Not since the 1986 Wapping dispute, when Murdoch broke the unions in order to introduce new technology into Fleet Street, have we seen a national newspaper strike of the sort playing outside the newspapers’ offices in north London.

Ostensibly, the walkout – the first in the company since 1971 – is in part a protest over the Scott Trust’s decision to jettison The Observer, essentially gifting it to an enterprising but loss-making startup called Tortoise. Many staff think it is inappropriate to be gambling on the Sunday paper’s future in this way. The Trust, which sits on top of a £1.3bn endowment, is convinced it is behaving in the best interests of all concerned.

But I suspect that it’s the way the deal was done that accounts for the anger. Bluntly, it doesn’t feel very much “in the same spirit as heretofore”. Observer and Guardian journalists have worked ever more closely together for more than 30 years. Now they’re being split up – and the objection is that none of them had a meaningful say in it. If you work for Rupert Murdoch you’d have no complaints: that’s what you’ve signed up for. But the Scott Trust was meant to behave differently.

Now journalists begin to worry about their independence. James Murdoch famously concluded a lecture in 2009 with the ringing cry: “The only reliable, durable, and perpetual guarantor of independence is profit.” This was back in the days when his politics more naturally coincided with those of his father.

The more alert in the room at the time asked themselves, “Independence from whom?” No amount of profit will buy you independence from Rupert Murdoch, if he happens to own you. Scott and his successors were free to think and report what they liked – even, sometimes, at a short-term cost to the business. If there’s to be a more muscular approach to newsonomics at the Scott Trust, driven by the commercial side, what will independence look like? Fleet Street has several recent examples of how things can go badly wrong.

Now, the Guardian’s politics are not everyone’s cup of tea. Rival newspaper owners like to sneer at the paper’s financial affairs. Former Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre used to label it part of the “subsidariat” – by which he meant news organisations that couldn’t connect with enough consumers to be commercially viable.

For others, the idea of journalists being at the heart of how a newspaper is run feels self-indulgent: hacks should concentrate on the words and leave the numbers to the grown-ups who know how to run a “proper” business.

But that’s not how Scott turned a local Manchester newspaper into a world-renowned journal. It’s not why his family signed away their fortune to preserve the “heretofore”. The strikes and the angry letters are evidence of a fracture. It will not be easy to heal because there’s a rift in the understanding of what this particular newspaper was intended to be.

The Murdoch model of press baron is, over the last 100 years or so, the predominant one. He merely took the Beaverbrook, Northcliffe, Hearst, Rothermere and Pulitzer tradition and did it bolder and brassier, unencumbered by too many moral scruples.

The Scott model is smaller, poorer and less emulated: in fact, it may very well be unique. We need it to flourish.

Alan Rusbridger was a member of the Scott Trust while editor-in-chief of the Guardian