Meeting the Managing Director of the Guardian

I just left my Strategy seminar awed by an inspirational talk by the Managing Director of the Guardian, Tim Brooks. Recently, with the unfolding of the Arab Revolutions, I have held independent media in high esteem for its ability to shape world events. The Guardian always offered an insightful perspective on what takes place behind the scenes. As a professional news agency, its journalists seemed committed to the truth.

Although the class discussion was about the Guardian's business model and how the news agency is coping with the inevitable shift from print to digital media, I was fortunate enough to approach Brooks at the end of the talk to ask him a question that boggled my mind for sometime, " How did the Guardian get a hold of a true estimate of Mubarak's fortune?"

The reason meeting Brooks meant a lot to me was because of how the Guardian's article about Mubarak's $70 bn fortune tipped the scale in favor of the Egyptian revolution's success. At a time when my nation was at an inflection point, and Egypt's destiny stood on a thin line between revolution and counter-revolution, it was this news about the abhorent corruption that had plagued our governing system that drove the final nail in the Mubarak regime's coffin.

I was curious to find out how the Guardian had obtained exclusive access to this piece of information. According to Brooks, Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, got hold of 200,000 diplomatic cable leaks. Instead of releasing them all, he collaborated with news agencies, such as the Guardian and the New York Times, to filter through them and release ones that would have a strategic impact. It was during the climax of the Egyptian revolution that the Guardian decided to release the news of Mubarak's fortune and expose the a secret that the U.S. and Egyptian governments had withheld thus far.

It was amazing how a single piece of information could shape a nation's history. I personally thanked Brooks as an Egyptian for his agency's decision to commit itself the truth. Athough a lecture by the head of a news agency that has been around since 1821 was a treat in and of itself, a conversation up close and in person with Mr. Brooks about how his agency contributed to my nation's history was more than I could ever ask for!