The government published its draft defamation bill in March, which introduces new measures for England and Wales which aim to support free speech, enable people to protect their reputation and stop unreasonable threats of being sued for libel.
Speaking before the Joint Committee on the Draft Defamation Bill committee today Rusbridger said the nature of a story is changing and that new legislation needs to reflect this.
"My head of digital a couple of years ago said the story is gone as a form of information telling and I thought she was mad at the time. But if you look at the form of live blogging on the web and now see what she meant, as a way of telling a story as it's happening.
"In the olden days you wrote a story, you put your jacket on and went home to the pub and that was it. There was no afterlife. Now increasingly you write a story there is an afterlife. People start responding. And newspapers are struggling with building that in to the mechanism of telling the story. I think it's an improvement because you can begin to clarify and add facts as you go along."
He added that the bill also needs to consider the future role of journalists as editors and curators of content.
"So if part of the skill of a journalist is now editing the work of others and aggregating and linking to it and pulling it into what we're doing, you create what I think of as a mutualised platform and the skills become sifting and editing that. And I don't see anything really in the bill as it stands at the moment, except in Anthony Lester's Appendix C, that begins to get to grip with that and I think it's going to be a huge part of journalism in the future and rightly so."
He added: "I think actually it may be that if one can get some elasticity into the defamation framework, so if you publish something and within an hour you realise it's wrong and you correct it and clarify it, then I think any defamation framework's got to take account of what that hour is worth, of misinformation, before you voluntarily correct it yourself.
"And whether we're not living in an age perhaps, less when newspapers imagined we were making tablets of stone pronouncements about what the truth was, but doing something more tentative, we're saying these are the facts as we know them at the moment, if we discover the facts are different we'll tell you. I think there's a sort of more elasticity that perhaps isn't reflected at the moment."
During the today's session Rusbridger, as well as other senior media industry figures appearing in front of the joint committee, also raised concerns about proposals to end the use of juries in libel trials, apart from in exceptional cases, saying he was "a bit anxious about that".
"My issue is where who is telling the truth, that's where you'd want a jury trial, but I agree they do add complication and cost so I'm not against the possibility of us hearing them without, I just think before you completely abolish them, there are some cases when the issue is who is telling the truth where you might want a jury," Rusbridger said.
Philip Johnston, the assistant editor of the Daily Telegraph added that if jury trials could be done more cheaply "then I think we would want them".
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