Media Matters
Stephen Glover
The Guardian’s relaunch as a tabloid has come and gone. The reception was generally good. For my taste there is too much white space, and the new incarnation has a slightly laid-back feel, more like a magazine than a vibrant newspaper. This is often the case with root-and-branch redesigns. What usually happens is that journalists get hold of the paper – the precious designer having withdrawn – and gradually adapt it to reflect the urgent realities of news. Less white space, and more type, will probably be the eventual outcome.
But, in a way, all the media hullabaloo has been beside the point. This is a facelift for a print newspaper already on death row. When the Guardian was re-launched in the so-called Berliner format in 2005 (the same sort of shape as Le Monde), it was selling nearly 400,000 copies a day. The most recent circulation figure I have is 151,625. Sales are declining at a rate of between five and ten per cent a year; so it will not be very long before, like the Independent in 2016, the print edition is forced to close.
It can be tedious to bang on about past mistakes, but the role of the Guardian’s management in hastening the decline in sales should not be overlooked. Unlike its rival the Times (which has lost a much smaller proportion of its circulation over the past decade), the Guardian has not charged online. Many readers have therefore understandably elected to stop buying the paper. It’s a bit like the manager of a restaurant saying that, if clients want to come through the back door and eat the same sort of food off different plates, they won’t have to pay. Not requiring readers to stump up online may have worked for Mailonline, which is a strikingly different publication to the Daily Mail, but it has not been a success for the Guardian, which is similar in tone and content whether in print or on the web.
While I am about it, I had better mention another cock-up, namely the choice of the Berliner shape. When the Times went tabloid in 2003, it incurred no extra costs because the new format was half the size of the old broadsheet one. No new presses were needed.
But the Guardian’s decision to adopt a fancy continental shape, unique in this country, meant it had to buy expensive presses costing £80 million. As sales plummeted, largely because of the paper’s free online offering, the new presses lay increasingly idle, though they were used to print the Observer (the
Guardian’s sister paper) on Saturday evenings. Because no other publisher uses the Berliner shape, there was no contract work for the underworked presses. It was a case of vanity and uncommercial thinking.
All this happened during the twentyyear reign of Alan Rusbridger, who stood down as editor in 2015. His successor, Katharine Viner, and the relatively new managing director, David Pemsel, appear to have recognised some of their predecessors’ errors, which is why the costly Berliner has been junked. But they can’t bring themselves to charge readers online (of whom there are some 150 million a month), probably because they believe they have gone too far down that road to turn back. Instead, they have come up with the novel idea of begging readers for money. This wheeze appears to have succeeded better than I expected. Last October, the Guardian claimed more than 300,000 so-called ‘members’ paying at least £5 a month, largely for the pleasure of reading the paper online. I make that £18 million a year – quite a tidy sum. Whether they will go on digging into their pockets in such numbers is anyone’s guess.
The Guardian has been losing huge sums of money for as long as anyone can remember, despite periodic cost-cutting exercises which have invariably come to nothing. According to my calculations, it has posted losses of some £380 million over the past twelve years. Although it has shares worth nearly a billion pounds (the consequence of prudent investment decisions by a previous generation), the paper will obviously go bust if it continues to lose money at this rate – as Viner and Pemsel are well aware. They may be turning things around. In 2016, it lost £69 million, which was reduced to £38 million in 2017 as a result of a new wave of redundancies and other cost-cutting measures. This year, losses are expected to be around £25 million, and Viner is talking about breaking even next year, which would be a fantastic achievement, though perhaps a bit optimistic.
I happen to think the Guardian has grown a little duller (and more Leftwing) since Rusbridger departed. But as the chief proponent of the Berliner idea, and the main proselytiser of not charging online, he can’t be described as someone with a beady eye on the bottom line.
The new tabloid edition may not rattle the teacups but it could be a sign that at long last the whole Guardian operation is on the path to financial viability.