I was hoping this article went deeper into the Guardian's somewhat unusual ownership model, because I find it interesting and would love to learn more.
The Guardian is owned by (and I think largely funded by?) a trust that was intentionally set up in a way to ensure no commercial interest could interfere with the paper. How well it achieved that goal is, of course, debatable, but it has survived nearly a century in that form.
The original founder of the guardian, Taylor, ran it like a business. While today journalism struggles to make money, in the 1800s news was lucrative.
In his will, Taylor carved out a sweetheart deal (right of first refusal) to sell the paper to CP Scott, a progressive Liberal politician, and also his nephew.
After running the paper for many years, CP Scott's will named his two sons to inherit. Both of whom worked as editors on the daily.
In a freak turn of events, both CP Scott and one of the sons died within a few months. The remaining son was concerned about paying double for the hefty inheritance tax at the time ("death tax").
The death tax could be so large as to force a sale of the paper, to create liquidity to cover the tax. I guess it was a tax on unrealized gains!
The remaining son, John, cleverly found a workaround to avoid the silly death tax: by renouncing his ownership and transferring the business to a Trust. Since he worked at the paper as editor, giving up ownership was a clever tradoff that actually gave him de facto tenure as editor, by making his day job more stable.
This is all to say: the guardian became a nonprofit-like trust at a point in time it was already a stable business, with capital to self-finance.
This was not a case of a independently wealthy businessman creating a foundation to create a paper from scratch (like many created universities).
The Scott trust was created by journalists for journalists, at a unique point in time where journalists had money to self-finance. Motivated not by some idealistic vision but by a more practical desire to avoid a hefty tax on unrealized gains.
I’m not sure that it’s ownership is the reason for The Guardians success. NYT has also been successful with a more traditional ownership model.
Their success, I suspect, is due to being early to shift from addressing a particular geographic market, to addressing an ideological market, after the internet destroyed the geographical barriers to entry.
I suspect this internet driven incentive to focus on ideological markets is a big part of why politics in most countries has become so partisan. When newspapers focused on a particular geography, but had limited completion, they had an incentive to avoid becoming partisan because that would only serve to limit their addressable market.
I think a big part of it is that the internet made the existing leaders into massive winners, a bit like how the teams at the top if the first division managed to cement themselves in the premiership when that happened.
If you were to name some important newspapers in 1995, you'd probably also have the Guardian, NYT, WaPo, on your list. They just pulled away from the pack due to the was reputation works in the internet age.
The guardian always addressed a left of centre audience even before the internet. The Telegraph a right of centre one. The print advert market used to sustain that.
The Guardian is fairly protected from commercial influence but its not that well protected against elitism, which unfortunately still means a lot in the UK today.
This is why the Guardian is simultaneously "progressive", yet also at times openly hostile to the working class. Its "progressive but not working class" stance promotes identity politics, and probably does more to pit left-wing voters against each other than any other UK-publication.
That said, I am a subscribe to the Guardian Weekly which I supplement with the Spectator, a traditionally conservative publication, in order to get a decent balance of UK news.
In Denmark it is not too uncommon for the larger companies, JP/Politikens Hus which publishes two of the largest Danish newspapers is trust owned. Novo Nordisk and Mærsk which are the two largest danish companies are trust owned as well.
Yeah right. And pigs just flew past my window. Because billionaires definitely don't pre-hide their fingerprints in some shady 'independent trust' while we all pretend the article just wrote itself out of the goodness of corporate hearts.
There's zero assurance that they could provide that would convince me this doesn't come with influence over editorial matters. It's the same problem NPR has (shoutout to the 'old "National Petroleum Radio" moniker from the invasions of the oughts).
Universities with large endowments still charge tuition. The available proceeds from appreciation of the trust may not be enough to cover their operating expenses.
The paper is required to operate on a commercial basis, but the trust ensures that they can always afford to say "no" to anyone trying to influence editorial matters, and indeed The Guardian has operated at significant losses at times.
It is one of the better UK papers but the bar there is extremely low. They're often still painfully "both sides" on things, they're slow on the uptake and they're often quite credulous. Wonderful example that I had scrolled past shortly before I switched tabs and read your comment: https://x.com/Obseyxx/status/1906396387031368067
As I said, they're the best of a bad bunch but that's damning with faint praise.
They've gone downhill in the last few years in my opinion, they've become more overtly partisan and got substantially downgraded on factual reporting by MediaBias Fact check: https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/the-guardian/
They've always been left of centre, but they're lazy and jump more into the predictable culture war pandering.
The FT is streets ahead of anyone else, they've become more centrist and less dry in recent years. I don't know what their revenues are like but I'd wager that they're doing better as they're one of the only ones with a business model that allows them to pay for good journalism.
Simple but effective, I like it. Journalism in the best form is exactly this: trying to give you the whole picture with all the context you need to contextualize the information.
Sadly a lot of what calls itself jouranlism today is the exact opposite: Not showing the whole picture, serving prexisting world views, overly emotional and out to entertain.
> Sadly a lot of what calls itself jouranlism today is the exact opposite
I don’t think this is something new, I feel that most of "journalism" has always been like this with few medias making the effort to show the whole picture.
The Guardian feels like the last good normal newspaper at this point. Great book and movie reviews, normal detailed circa 2005 coverage, and none of the NYT’s wierd if we didn’t break the story we won’t talk about it.
>The Guardian US expects to hit $44 million in voluntary reader donations in the U.S. and Canada this year, up 33 percent over last year
>"We’re now at a place where our audience is actually bigger in the U.S. than The Wall Street Journal’s audience in the U.S."
That feels like not that much money considering the readership, right? The WSJ has somewhere around 3 million subscribers; they would need to be making only 14 dollars per subscription per year to do that sort of revenue.
Not to say that's necessarily a bad thing, but more that you need a pretty substantial readership to get there.
Put another way, that revenue is like 200k subscribers at 20 bucks a month. That would put you at the level of a newspaper like the Minnesota Star Tribune as far as subscription revenue.
That's my point. This is a website with readership comparable to the WSJ that is pulling in reader revenue closer to the Minnesota Star Tribune.
It's just something that I feel should be in the conversation. The Guardian's business model is clearly successful for them, but IMO it's not something that can apply to most other newspapers.
Based on my napkin math for the WSJ compared to the Guardian, the WSJ would only expect to get ~5% of their revenue replaced if they switched business models. Even if I'm off by a factor of 5, you'd still be looking at a 75% reduction.
I don't say this to be critical of the Guardian. I love their work and I'm happy they've chosen the model they have, because it enables access to high-quality journalism for free. It is also a great case study proving that this business model works and can be sustainable. But I don't want people drawing the conclusion that every newspaper could survive like this.
I'm surprised at all the love for the Guardian... It's better than nearly all the rest, sure, but it's still often outrage-bait or inaccurate information. Media bias / Fact check give them a rating of 'Mixed' on accuracy: https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/the-guardian/
I had a free subscription to the Financial Times through a weird cookie misshap, and I was impressed by the quality of the reporting and the fact they were happy to shoot down corporations behaving unethically, which I hadn't a priori expected.
Mediabiasfactcheck is run by someone on the Council of Foreign Relations fwiw. While their Foreign Affairs publishes stuff critical of US policy, they are heavily America biased.
In my view, both the FT and The Economist are better, more balanced, more centrist, and less conservative/neoliberal than many people give them credit for.
Lindsay Anderson the left wing film maker always read the telegraph to be able to see the lies more clearly. A centrist these days might want to read both that and the guardian to steer a true course!
Watching them throw Sanders and then Corbyn under the bus was a wake up call for me. It's not the leftist paper it makes out to be, but strongly establishment.
Conservative leaning newspapers weren't always total dogshit and good reporting is good reporting, regardless of ideology. This is a belief that you don't seem to share, given you make out ideology to be the problem as opposed to the quality of the journalism itself. Very shallow thinking and it's a perfect exemplification of poor media literacy.
The other day they forced me to give full consent to all advertising cookies in order to read without a subscription. I found this surprising, I do read them a great deal, it might only happen for heavy users.
Apparently the ICO in the UK has decided that "consent or pay" can be compliant with the UK GDPR, the post-brexit version of the GDPR that's in UK law.
It feels wrong to me, but there we are.
Personally I use an ad-blocker, but I also subscribe for a few bucks a month.
They have to pay the bills somehow. The alternative to "consent or pay" is "pay". I'm really struggling to see how you feel its wrong.
I am actually having difficulty writing this, as "consent to share your data" is ultimately a way to track and collect data on you. But what can you do? They are offering you something which takes time and money to produce. You can pay for it with money or with your data.
Isn't this choice better than companies just always tracking you, and also trying to get you to buy something?
Deep down I know most people don't understand the amount of data and other information companies collect on them nor what they do with it. But at a certain point we have autonomy. I'd rather be given a choice between "we track all your data" or you can pay verses the default of tracking all data and paying. There is always the third option of not consuming the content. The choices we make.
As a long-standing Guardian reader, I couldn't disagree more. It might be financially solvent, but the business model of the paper under the leadership of Katherine Viner has shifted to high throughput, low quality content vying for clicks in the attention economy. They have gone all-in on volume.
Compare that to the Financial Times, which has a low throughput of very high quality content, enabled by a discerning and high paying subscriber base. I read the Guardian for the lifestyle / cooking sections these days, but the FT is an incomparably better and more serious publication, whatever your politics (mine are the diametric opposite of the financial class).
Yeah, me too. I'm definitely more on the side of the Guardian politics wise, but the FT is SO MUCH BETTER.
To be fair though, the FT is both really expensive, sells market data for a large price, and has a tier of subscription that can only be bought by organisations (they didn't even show me a price).
The Guardian has been going downhill massively over the last few years. I think the point at which I lost faith in them was when they trumpeted that 50% of carbon emissions were caused by 10 companies (i.e. the oil majors).
They approach environmental reporting like a campaign organisation, it's just not serious. Politically, I will never forgive the Guardian for the mendacious editorial campaign they waged against the Corbyn project. In general, the Guardian leads with cultural issues geared towards the liberal professional managerial class, which only compounds the logic and superficiality of its clickbait business model. It is incredibly hard to learn anything by reading the Guardian. This quote from the nymag piece is telling: “The reason I think that it works for us is we cover so much breaking news and it drives a lot of traffic, and we have the scale to make it work,” Reed said. “Even if we only monetize one percent, it’s still a lot.”
Readit News
The Guardian is owned by (and I think largely funded by?) a trust that was intentionally set up in a way to ensure no commercial interest could interfere with the paper. How well it achieved that goal is, of course, debatable, but it has survived nearly a century in that form.
You can read more about it here:
https://www.theguardian.com/the-scott-trust
The original founder of the guardian, Taylor, ran it like a business. While today journalism struggles to make money, in the 1800s news was lucrative.
In his will, Taylor carved out a sweetheart deal (right of first refusal) to sell the paper to CP Scott, a progressive Liberal politician, and also his nephew.
After running the paper for many years, CP Scott's will named his two sons to inherit. Both of whom worked as editors on the daily.
In a freak turn of events, both CP Scott and one of the sons died within a few months. The remaining son was concerned about paying double for the hefty inheritance tax at the time ("death tax").
The death tax could be so large as to force a sale of the paper, to create liquidity to cover the tax. I guess it was a tax on unrealized gains!
The remaining son, John, cleverly found a workaround to avoid the silly death tax: by renouncing his ownership and transferring the business to a Trust. Since he worked at the paper as editor, giving up ownership was a clever tradoff that actually gave him de facto tenure as editor, by making his day job more stable.
This is all to say: the guardian became a nonprofit-like trust at a point in time it was already a stable business, with capital to self-finance.
This was not a case of a independently wealthy businessman creating a foundation to create a paper from scratch (like many created universities).
The Scott trust was created by journalists for journalists, at a unique point in time where journalists had money to self-finance. Motivated not by some idealistic vision but by a more practical desire to avoid a hefty tax on unrealized gains.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Trust_Limited
Bozo could easily establish a similar trust to support the Wash Post in perpetuity. But clearly he has other motives.
Their success, I suspect, is due to being early to shift from addressing a particular geographic market, to addressing an ideological market, after the internet destroyed the geographical barriers to entry.
I suspect this internet driven incentive to focus on ideological markets is a big part of why politics in most countries has become so partisan. When newspapers focused on a particular geography, but had limited completion, they had an incentive to avoid becoming partisan because that would only serve to limit their addressable market.
If you were to name some important newspapers in 1995, you'd probably also have the Guardian, NYT, WaPo, on your list. They just pulled away from the pack due to the was reputation works in the internet age.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Harmsworth,_1st_Viscoun...
https://www.irishtimes.com/about-us/the-irish-times-trust/
This is why the Guardian is simultaneously "progressive", yet also at times openly hostile to the working class. Its "progressive but not working class" stance promotes identity politics, and probably does more to pit left-wing voters against each other than any other UK-publication.
That said, I am a subscribe to the Guardian Weekly which I supplement with the Spectator, a traditionally conservative publication, in order to get a decent balance of UK news.
Edit: Scratch that. Bosch is owned by a foundation.
Deleted Comment
How do they explain their taking ads, then? https://advertising.theguardian.com
There's zero assurance that they could provide that would convince me this doesn't come with influence over editorial matters. It's the same problem NPR has (shoutout to the 'old "National Petroleum Radio" moniker from the invasions of the oughts).
EDIT: you -> they
And assuming the trust is well funded, they may not feel compelled to do so.
That said, its very possible for not for profit entities to go very wrong so you cant rule it out absolutely.
Back when it was The Manchester Guardian, they produced one of the most remarkable TV commercials in history, "Points of View":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SsccRkLLzU
I first saw this commercial when Will Hearst (yes, of that Hearst family) screened it at a Software Development Forum meeting in the late 1980s.
I wish this were a better transfer, but it is what we have. Does anyone have a link to a higher resolution transfer?
As I said, they're the best of a bad bunch but that's damning with faint praise.
They've always been left of centre, but they're lazy and jump more into the predictable culture war pandering.
The FT is streets ahead of anyone else, they've become more centrist and less dry in recent years. I don't know what their revenues are like but I'd wager that they're doing better as they're one of the only ones with a business model that allows them to pay for good journalism.
Sadly a lot of what calls itself jouranlism today is the exact opposite: Not showing the whole picture, serving prexisting world views, overly emotional and out to entertain.
I don’t think this is something new, I feel that most of "journalism" has always been like this with few medias making the effort to show the whole picture.
Deleted Comment
I guess "in English" was implied.
>"We’re now at a place where our audience is actually bigger in the U.S. than The Wall Street Journal’s audience in the U.S."
That feels like not that much money considering the readership, right? The WSJ has somewhere around 3 million subscribers; they would need to be making only 14 dollars per subscription per year to do that sort of revenue.
Not to say that's necessarily a bad thing, but more that you need a pretty substantial readership to get there.
Put another way, that revenue is like 200k subscribers at 20 bucks a month. That would put you at the level of a newspaper like the Minnesota Star Tribune as far as subscription revenue.
I suspect donors (as opposed to subscribers) pay much less than $240/year.
It's just something that I feel should be in the conversation. The Guardian's business model is clearly successful for them, but IMO it's not something that can apply to most other newspapers.
Based on my napkin math for the WSJ compared to the Guardian, the WSJ would only expect to get ~5% of their revenue replaced if they switched business models. Even if I'm off by a factor of 5, you'd still be looking at a 75% reduction.
I don't say this to be critical of the Guardian. I love their work and I'm happy they've chosen the model they have, because it enables access to high-quality journalism for free. It is also a great case study proving that this business model works and can be sustainable. But I don't want people drawing the conclusion that every newspaper could survive like this.
I had a free subscription to the Financial Times through a weird cookie misshap, and I was impressed by the quality of the reporting and the fact they were happy to shoot down corporations behaving unethically, which I hadn't a priori expected.
(Separately the writing style is mostly not to my taste, but that's subjective)
Deleted Comment
It feels wrong to me, but there we are.
Personally I use an ad-blocker, but I also subscribe for a few bucks a month.
They have to pay the bills somehow. The alternative to "consent or pay" is "pay". I'm really struggling to see how you feel its wrong.
I am actually having difficulty writing this, as "consent to share your data" is ultimately a way to track and collect data on you. But what can you do? They are offering you something which takes time and money to produce. You can pay for it with money or with your data.
Isn't this choice better than companies just always tracking you, and also trying to get you to buy something?
Deep down I know most people don't understand the amount of data and other information companies collect on them nor what they do with it. But at a certain point we have autonomy. I'd rather be given a choice between "we track all your data" or you can pay verses the default of tracking all data and paying. There is always the third option of not consuming the content. The choices we make.
You get tracked when you subcribe as well. The Guardian is far from perfect, and that bothers me more when I'm paying a subscription.
Compare that to the Financial Times, which has a low throughput of very high quality content, enabled by a discerning and high paying subscriber base. I read the Guardian for the lifestyle / cooking sections these days, but the FT is an incomparably better and more serious publication, whatever your politics (mine are the diametric opposite of the financial class).
To be fair though, the FT is both really expensive, sells market data for a large price, and has a tier of subscription that can only be bought by organisations (they didn't even show me a price).
The Guardian has been going downhill massively over the last few years. I think the point at which I lost faith in them was when they trumpeted that 50% of carbon emissions were caused by 10 companies (i.e. the oil majors).