Sheet music by Alan Charles Rusbridger

Alan Charles Rusbridger is a British journalist, Principal of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford and the former editor-in-chief of The Guardian. He took up the post in 1995, having been a reporter and columnist earlier in his career. Rusbridger stood down from the post at the end of May 2015 and was succeeded by Katharine Viner. When Rusbridger was five, the family returned to Britain and he was educated at Lanesborough Prep School, Guildford, where he was also a chorister at Christ Church, and Cranleigh School, a boys’ independent school in Cranleigh, Surrey. At Magdalene College, Cambridge, he read English Literature. During the vacations of his first two years at university, he worked for the Cambridge Evening News as an intern, and accepted a job offer from the newspaper after graduation. He stayed with the Evening News until 1979. He then joined The Guardian as a reporter, and subsequently wrote the paper’s diary column and later became a feature writer. In November 1985, Rusbridger had a brief stint as a Royal reporter following the Prince and Princess of Wales around Melbourne, Australia. Fascinated by gadgets, at this stage he was already using a Tandy word processor and an early (slow) modem to file stories back to London.He left in 1986 to become TV critic of The Observer, then an entirely separate newspaper, before moving to America to be the Washington editor of the short-lived London Daily News in 1987. After returning to The Guardian, he launched the "Weekend" supplement in 1988, followed by the paper’s "G2" section. He became features editor in 1994. As editor-in-chief, in August 2013 Rusbridger took the decision to destroy hard drives containing information leaked to The Guardian by Edward Snowden, rather than comply with a government demand to hand over the data. An alternative action was agreed and in the presence of the authorities the drives were destroyed, Rusbridger described performing the task as "slightly pointless". "Given that there were other copies, I saw no reason not to destroy this material ourselves." On 3 December 2013 Rusbridger gave evidence before a Home Affairs Select Committee hearing on counterterrorism at the UK Parliament with regard to the publication of information leaked by Snowden. In the film The Fifth Estate (2013), about The Guardian’s former association with the Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, Rusbridger was portrayed by Peter Capaldi.[15]