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.
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.
[8][non-primary source needed] 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.
[10] Rusbridger was appointed as the editor of The Guardian by the Scott Trust in late January 1995 after a decisive vote of the National Union of Journalists chapel, management and trustees in an electoral college.
[11] As editor, he defended the paper against a number of high-profile defamation suits, including those from the Police Federation and the Conservative MPs, Neil Hamilton and Jonathan Aitken.
[10] Hamilton's case collapsed shortly before a court hearing, while Aitken was demonstrated to have perjured himself, and served a prison sentence as a result.
[12] Seen early in his editorship as a modernising new broom, he commented in June 1997 shortly after the election of Tony Blair's first New Labour government that the "old" Guardian: "opposed lots of things the Tories did which we'd now think weren't terribly bad in retrospect ...
[19] 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.
[22] Edward Snowden said his actions in leaking the documents that formed the basis of the reporting "would have been meaningless without the dedication, passion, and skill of these newspapers".
[22] 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.
[31] In January 2016, Rusbridger led Lady Margaret Hall to explore starting a Foundation Year for young people from under-represented backgrounds.
[32][33] Announcing the scheme, Rusbridger wrote: "there are groups of young people today who are markedly under-represented at Oxford, even if it is not quite right to call them "excluded".
She told The Guardian: "One of the many advantages of the collegiate system is that it allows us to engage in a small scale pilot like this to help us identify innovative ways to recruit under-represented groups.
Repeated failures are detailed by the students who felt let down by the college's welfare and safeguarding systems and the responses of staff to allegations of sexual assault while Rusbridger was Principal.
[39] The-then Acting Principal of Lady Margaret Hall, Christine Gerrard, said "LMH has recognised that there is scope for improvement in our non-academic disciplinary procedures, which includes how the college deals with allegations of sexual assault and harassment.
We have established a working party, with external members, which is currently reviewing these procedures" and agreed to become the first Oxford University college to sign the government backed Can't Buy My Silence pledge to not use non-disclosure agreements (NDAs).
[41] Michelle Donelan, then Minister of State for Higher and Further Education, said the college's decision was "morally bankrupt" and Lady Margaret Hall should be "ashamed".
[43] He is a governor of the Ditchley Foundation,[44] an organisation which exists to promote international relations, and 10:10, a British climate change campaign for a 10% reduction in carbon emissions in 2010.
Máiría Cahill called upon Rusbridger to resign from this position because in October 2014 The Guardian carried an article critical of her claims to have been a victim of sexual abuse by a former IRA member.
[49] The reporter was Roy Greenslade who, at the time, had not acknowledged that he was an IRA supporter who wrote under the pseudonym 'George King' for the newspaper An Phoblacht for many years.