Media Matters
But do the donors realise this ‘down-and-out’ is a billionaire?
When a few years ago the Guardian announced it would be soliciting donations from online readers, many were sceptical, me included. It seemed people were so used to reading things free on the web that they would be unlikely to dig into their pockets voluntarily. Surely this was a slightly crackers idea, dreamt up by high-minded types with little idea of how the world really works.
How wrong we sceptics were. Those who look at the Guardian online will be aware that, at the end of many articles, a begging bowl is extended in a pretty forthright way. ‘We have a favour to ask...’ Since the scheme was launched in March 2016, a million people have given money, and there are about 600,000 so-called members on the books. Many of them are in America, where the online paper has a large and devout readership. The target is to attract two million donors by the time of the title’s 200th anniversary in 2022.
How much money has been raised in this way is not clear from the most recent accounts, but it undoubtedly runs into many millions of pounds. In addition to some savage cost-cutting, the new funding model has enabled the Guardian Media Group to reduce its losses dramatically to £18.6 million in the year ending 1 April 2018, an improvement on £38.9 million of losses in the previous year. Figures for the 12 months just ended will be published in July. They may show the paper is close to breaking even.
This would be a stupendous achievement for a company which has managed to haemorrhage more than £300 million over the past decade. Of course it may not last. Belt-tightening at the paper has invariably been followed by spending splurges. But there are good reasons to suppose that, under the disciplined and austere direction of chief executive David Pemsel and editor Katharine Viner, the Guardian will not immediately revert to its old spendthrift ways.
Yet there is an oddity that no one has pointed out. Although congenitally loss-making for many years, the Guardian Media Group is actually very rich, principally because of its former ownership, now ended, of Autotrader, which flogs cars online. According to the recent memoirs by the Guardian’s erstwhile editor Alan Rusbridger, the paper has about a billion pounds in the bank. This is an incredible sum, which makes a newspaper that perennially presents itself as impoverished one of the richest in the world.
Am I being picky? I reiterate my admiration for the brilliant wheeze of dunning readers. And the paper has every right to ask for money because its journalism doesn’t come cheap. But I wonder how many generous souls searching for spare change realise just how wealthy this self-advertising down-and-out really is. It’s as though one dropped a coin into a hat proffered by a shabby gentleman outside White’s in St James’s, only to turn and watch him sneak into the well-heeled club.
There is a convention that unsigned obituaries shouldn’t upend buckets of manure on the recently deceased who have lived respectable and distinguished lives. However, it is considered legitimate to be rude about mafia bosses and the criminally inclined.
A recent full-page obit in the Daily Telegraph on the philosopher Mary Warnock slightly took my breath away. The former Mistress of Girton and pillar of liberal orthodoxy was written off as an unoriginal thinker, too confident in such gifts as she had, unpleasingly competitive and snobbish. The writer was unable to find much good in a long and busy life.
It was a lively piece that accorded with many of my prejudices. But should it have appeared under the protection of anonymity? I think not. Fine to write a score-settling, bylined article in a publication such as the Spectator. But as well as being cruel, the spiteful anonymous obituary, even if based in truth, undermines itself. The reader will naturally ask whether the writer is motivated by personal malice. Had the author of the hatchet job on Baroness Warnock come to grief at her hands in the past?
The Financial Times boasts a paying readership of one million, three quarters of which is accounted for by digital subscribers who fork out good money. Management account figures reportedly show an operating profit of £25 million for the paper last year.
Meanwhile the most recent figures for the once-mighty Sun and its Sunday sister revealed pre-tax losses of £91.2 million, following disappointing results in the previous two years.
There is much chatter about the possible demise of newspapers. But a specialist financial publication such as the FT, which is able to charge readers for its content, is immune to this trend. However, the Sun, like other tabloids, faces seemingly ineluctable circulation decline, and is a late entrant into the not-very-lucrative arena of free digital journalism.