Accurate, Focused Research on Law, Technology and Knowledge Discovery Since 2002

UK Guardian faces financial hurdles in taking investigations global

A British newspaper wants to take its aggressive investigations global, but money is running out. by Ken Auletta, New Yorker, October 7, 2013.

“Since June 5th, the Guardian had been publishing top-secret digital files provided by Edward Snowden, a former contract employee of the National Security Agency. In a series of articles, the paper revealed that the N.S.A., in the name of combatting terrorism, had monitored millions of phone calls and e-mails as well as the private deliberations of allied governments. It also revealed, again relying on Snowden’s documents, that, four years earlier, the Government Communications Headquarters (G.C.H.Q.), Britain’s counterpart to the N.S.A., had eavesdropped on the communications of other nations attending the G20 summit, in London…It has been the Guardian’s biggest story so far. With eighty-four million monthly visitors, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, the Guardian Web site is now the third most popular English-language newspaper Web site in the world, behind London’s Daily Mail, with its celebrity gossip and abundant cleavage, and the New York Times. But its print circulation, of a hundred and ninety thousand, is half what it was in 2002. The Guardian, which is supported by the Scott Trust, established nearly eighty years ago to subsidize an “independent” and “liberal” newspaper, has lost money for nine straight years. In the most recent fiscal year, the paper lost thirty-one million pounds (about fifty million dollars), an improvement over the forty-four million pounds it lost the year before.”

Leave a reply