PositiveThe Irish Times (IRE)... a treasure trove of marvellous detail and some revelations ... the people and the detail tend to crowd out some of the policy. There is also perhaps an understandable bias of interest in the past, with two-thirds of the book devoted to the first half of the BBC’s existence, inevitably leading to later compression ... a valuable contribution to understanding how the very concept of broadcasting had to be created from a blank page and repeatedly reinvented in the face of changing technology and, now, rapidly changing public taste.
Alan Rusbridger
PositiveThe Irish Times...in Breaking News you get the inside story of the loneliness and unexpected self-doubt of the editor who must decide whether to go or not, knowing that in the case of the Snowden revelations, jail could easily have been the outcome ... In the defining stories there are revelations only of personal detail. The facts have long since been trawled over in inquiries, books and even Hollywood movies. The pleasure of the Monty Pythonesque tale of the British spooks insisting on the Guardian taking angle-grinders to destroy Snowden computers, even though multiple copies existed in the US under the protection of the First Amendment, endures ... The importance of the book, however, lies beyond memoirs of journalistic derring-do or certainties on how the world of the future should be ... Breaking News is a significant book for newspapers, journalism and anyone who cares about their increasingly vital contribution to an informed democracy in the midst of information chaos and fake news.
