Alan Rusbridger the Editor of the Guardian has started to twitter. Along the the Telegraph’s William Lewis he is blazing the trail for major newspaper editors in using the microblogging social network*. It should be of little surprise that he is leading the way. Many of his colleagues at the paper are avid users and the Guardian itself is redefining media concepts. The Guardian is no longer just a newspaper. It is a trusted media brand that delivers audio, video, web content as well as a daily, dead wood and ink edition.
When the Guardian re-launched itself in the smaller Berliner format in 2005, Rusbridger said that the Guardian website was cannibalising newspaper readership and that this was a factor in the prior fall in the paper’s circulation. He also said something else that provided a fascinating insight into the future of national daily newspapers. The new format required the purchase of new printers at some considerable cost; £62 million, £12 million more than the paper had budgeted. Rusbridger apparently said that he thought they would be the last printers that the paper bought.
This blog is a companion to the book ‘Public Relations and the Social Web’ available now from Amazon which examines the changing media landscape and its continuing evolution.
* Amended after Mick Fealty’s comment correcting the original assertion.
Newspapers are in the process of re-inventing themselves as news brands. In the future they will have to provide news across a variety of platforms, as many already do using podcasts and video as well as on-line editions. 
PR and the Social Web 