‘Guardian US’ launches membership program
Company banking on subscribers to offset plunging ad sales
Pressured by falling ad sales, the Guardian’s U.S. operation has embarked on a relatively rare industry tactic — seeking donations.
While its stories are free online, the British news organization is asking supporters in the U.S. to pay $4.99 a month, or $49 a year, for a membership. In return, members get “regular communications” from Guardian journalists and access to classes, workshops and events.
The Guardian is owned by the Scott Trust in the United Kingdom, a limited company whose profits are reinvested in journalism and do not benefit shareholders. And unlike for-profit companies, donations and membership solicitations have been viable components of non-profits and public benefit corporations, such as NPR, PBS and The Philadelphia Inquirer, Daily News and philly.com.
The Guardian’s new initiative underscores broader challenges the organization — and the entire print news industry — faces amid an advertising decline that has accelerated in recent months.
Advertisers’ spending on newspaper ads is estimated to decline 8.7% to $52.6 billion in 2016, according to advertising firm GroupM. And digital ad sales have been disappointing.
In March, Guardian Media Group, the Scott Trust’s unit that publishes the Guardian and the
Observer newspapers, posted operating losses amounting to about $84.2 million in the 12month period ending in March. The group plans to roll back its budget by 20% in the next three years and cut about 100 editorial jobs — out of about 725 — worldwide, as well as another 150 from other corporate departments.
The Guardian’s U.S. operation, which had been largely spared the turmoil back home, finally felt the belt-tightening last month, when about 50 jobs, or about 30% of its staffing, were cut across all functions. The cutback was a sudden jolt to a unit that had been growing rapidly and, at least journalistically, throwing prominent punches at more entrenched competitors in the U.S. since its launch in 2011.
One of the most widely read newspapers in the U.K., the
Guardian’s digital expansion to the U.S. was meant to broaden its readership. Its coverage of the National Security Agency’s surveillance operations, enabled by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden’s leaked documents, won the news outlet a Pulitzer Prize.
“The changes we are having to make are very challenging, but we need to ensure our journalism can be sustainable here in the U.S.,” Guardian US editor Lee Glendinning said. “We’ll be streamlining some of what we do accordingly, but we are committed to protecting our journalism.”
The Guardian US says its membership sign-ups increased almost 70% last week after it began promoting the program a week earlier. But the strategy, especially for a news organization that lacks a print presence here, could turn out to be a tough sell in a market not accustomed to public funding of journalism.
“It’s going to be hard,” says Lucia Moses, senior editor for publishing at Digiday, an online news site that covers digital media. “There are very few news properties that can charge for news content. It doesn’t have the big-name recognition” in the U.S.
In a recent interview, Glendinning said the Guardian US plans to make its mark in the competitive digital media landscape by carving out targeted areas that she says are “under-covered.”
“There’s something very powerful in looking at particular issues with fresh eyes,” she says. “We are covering the stories that other U.S. press nationally either aren’t interested or won’t touch. Those are the stories of police brutality, climate change, the vast inequality in the U.S. right now, the erosion of the reproductive rights. And gun control, which is a huge thing for us.”
She cites “The Counted” — its database and stories on police killings in the U.S., compiled with contribution from readers — as an impactful example of its editorial focus.
The project, she says, led the Justice Department and the FBI to consider collecting similar types of information.
Pursuing highly charged topics has helped to drive online traffic. The Guardian says its website has about 40 million unique users in the U.S., a 27% growth from a year ago.
In comparison, its traffic is about half the size of BuzzFeed or The Huffington Post, or roughly equivalent to digital news site Mashable.com, according to Moses of Digiday.
The strategy could turn out to be a tough sell in a market not accustomed to public funding of journalism.