Asking members to support journalism, The Guardian raises more revenue than ads | Hacker News Reader

Asking members to support journalism, The Guardian raises more revenue than ads

niemanlab.org

841 pointsgk1350 comments

This. Years ago it was obvious to most newspapers that paid subscribers are their lifeline. Advertisers come and go, daily sales come and go, but long-period subscribers keep you afloat. Somehow, when the respected newspapers moved to the web, they forgot that, and kept pumping ads like crazy. This, in essence, moved the sense of their product from quality content to clickable content - these two don't mix. Consequently, this eroded quality journalism, investigative, explanatory view of the world (and let's face it, TV could never replace that void, as they are solely relying on ads to survive). And then, a lot of bad things happened with peoples' opinions and understanding. I am glad many outlets are now seeing the correct path. The best news source in Poland nowadays is a wealthy, but niche, "Dziennik Gazeta Prawna" ("Daily Law Newspaper") with great, balanced content on serious issues - that relies mostly on subscribers. The best English periodical I have found is Foreign Affairs, also a very subscriber-focused outlet. Note that both of these seem to offer much better content in their paper issues than online.

My understanding is that paid subscribers (and newsstand sales) largely went into paying for printing and distribution while ads paid for basically everything else. Therefore, I expect that part of the thinking was that ads by themselves could pay for digital content creation and delivery.

It's also the case that most people assume that an outsized percentage of costs goes into the physical copy of things. At one point, this came up a lot when eBooks were getting big--though, in that case, the publishers ended up being able to hold the line fairly effectively.

Finally, there just aren't that many pubs that can really command a viable subscription price online--or really any at all. That the WSJ, NYT, and apparently the Guardian can isn't necessarily a recipe for a broader subscription model.

> in that case, the publishers ended up being able to hold the line fairly effectively.

By effectively you mean steadily declining sales as people return to printed books.

The decline is fairly small on a percentage basis and the reasons are debated--although it's definitely happened. A fairly sharp increase in audiobooks seems to be one reason. I suspect that people have also figured out that eBooks are good for some materials and not for others. Once you get away from books that are mostly flowing plain text, fiction in particular, eBooks don't generally work nearly as well.

I haven't seen pricing given as a major factor. Used books certainly compete with the eBook back catalog but they aren't usually counted under physical book sales.

I suppose anecdote is not the singular of data. But my family, friends and I have largely rejected e-books based on price. I read a lot.

>> t one point, this came up a lot when eBooks were getting big--though, in that case, the publishers ended up being able to hold the line fairly effectively.

I still get miffed when the e-book costs more than the paper copy. It's not like I expect them to be free, but when I'm buying the same product without the physical distribution, I would expect it to be <= the paper price.

I'm not sure how common it is but I agree with your basic point. Physical distribution is actually surprisingly a surprisingly small part of the cost of most books but unless there's some very funky royalty agreement or whatever in place, there's no reason for eBooks to cost more.

I see it relatively often - it's just as often the other way around, of course. Sometimes it's that way at launch, sometimes afterwards (I presume because physical stock is taking up warehouse space and needs to be shifted. I presume there's a built in convenience premium with e-books and the market has discovered you don't need to discount them.

Meh, it's just another small way in which the world refuses to make sense!

Totally agree. Even my favorite subscription (The Economist) had a time where I as a subscriber felt too much content was given away for free online. They luckily turned that back and kept the ecosphere going.

The number of ads in The Economist is pretty irritating for paid content

Note that Guardian is successful, because of "supporters" and not >subscribers<. It's different than WSJ, where they lock the content, until you pay. The Guardian way looks more like the Wikipedia one.

I really like the wikipedia model, but I know it wouldnt work for every outlet. I’ve contributed more to public radio and wikipedia than any other news service subscription.

Ideally, nytimes/wapo/economist would be completely open, and one would be able to ‘donate’ with a single press of the apple pay button.

I prefer that over yet another username password combo + subscription + app echo system I need to maintain.

Or best of both worlds: single click of apple pay button sets a cookie for 30 days of access; sends a courtesy reactivation email with a link in case you clear your cookies.

The big worry is that this doesn't work for local news at all. The nitty gritty details of governance happen at the local level - municipal and state/provincial legislatures. Journalism on that stuff doesn't scale.

Where's the proof that it doesn't scale to local level?

but local ads on local content are legitimately useful and the only type of display ad i’ve ever clicked on.

It is working in my community. http://www.berkeleyside.com/ has run a (very modest) profit for the last two years and continued to expand. Their focus is the greater Berkeley area; a population of about 350,000. It is a more educated and well-off population than national averages. The revenue split is 65-35% between supporters and advertising. They've also recently done a direct public offering of stock allowing for $800K in investment.

Local news, supported locally is possible.

Berkeley is profoundly out of the norm for American communities. Berkeley has money. Other places don't. This problem is not solved by the way things work where the money flows freely.

Berkeley has 350,000 people in it. It's also eighteen square miles in size. The entire Portland-South Portland-Biddeford MSA in Maine is about half a million people and it's two thousand square miles in size. And it certainly wouldn't in my hometown in the Lakes Region of Maine, with a population across four towns in the school district of about 15,000 people across a little under two hundred square miles.

The problem devolves to income inequality and the unsustainable nature of community-driven efforts because of it--nobody can afford it!

Why are they mutually exclusive? Newspapers have always had a local section.

But it doesn't need to scale. It needs to be as big as the area it services.

Hubris can be a powerful motive force. You get as big as the area you service, you think "I could do more than this", you get bigger, you service a larger area, you think "hey, is this enough..?" - and before you know it, the Manchester Guardian is a worldwide media company.

Arguably it works better. Minnesota Public Radio has 127,000 members [wikipedia], which is a bit over 2% of the population of MN. They do a far better job covering stuff like city politics than any other news organization in town.

The Guardian has 300,000 members [this article], which is 0.4% of the population of the UK. (And arguably, the better denominator would be the entire anglophone world.)

The Guardian was so like the Wikipedia model that Jimmy Wales was a board member of the trust. I would add a link to his wiki entry but it seems a bit recursive

Indeed, here's the relevant CEO quote in the article:

> "We recognize we have to get more direct-to-consumer revenue over time, and the way we will do that is through membership-type propositions, but it’s going to be much more than a paywall. A paywall is to me an inverse loyalty scheme, where the more you consume the more you pay, which doesn’t seem to work."

What if you pay as you consume up to a maximum? That would transition repeat users into, in effect, subscribers.

> The Guardian way looks more like the Wikipedia one

Have any newspapers experimented with crowd-funding stories? This Niemanlabs report suggests none of the big names had as of Sept 2016 - http://niemanreports.org/articles/crowdfunding-the-news/ - wonder if that's changed?

The newspapers haven't but some of their journalists certainly have, through (now defunct) platforms like spot.us or even just Kickstarter. The way I see it, working as a data journalist, the problem is that you never know beforehand what will turn up and "we will spend three months investigating this thing and who knows, maybe something interesting will turn up or maybe nothing at all" is not something you can easily get people excited about.

Yes, there’s a German platform that did this fairly successfully: Krautreporter [1] (the article mentions that they were in turn inspired by a Dutch magazine). I know nothing about their finances but they seem to be doing well, and have established themselves as a somewhat niche but serious competitor.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krautreporter

Don't opinion pieces work like that?

There is https://www.wikitribune.com/ which is supported both through subscriptions and donations. It's early days for Jimbo Wales's latest venture.

There are also “De Correspondent” [1] in the Netherlands, which inspired “Krautreporter” [2] in Germany and “Republik” [3] in Switzerland. Both De Correspondent and Republik set new records for crowd-funding in journalism, with the latter raising on the order of 3.5M USD. These projects used crowd-funding as initial funding though, and not for individual stories. Their ongoing financing is based on paid subscriptions.

[1] https://decorrespondent.nl/ [2] https://krautreporter.de/ [3] https://www.republik.ch/

Important to note that the Guardian is not actually financially successful at all. They have been suffering heavy losses for years

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2017/02/01/heavy-losses-...

Things have got a little better since Viner stepped in. Good take on the state of newspapers, and the particular success of the FT, from ex-editor of Guardian Peter Preston.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/nov/26/financial-time...

They also make use of offshore tax structures to minimise their taxes, such as the £302m profit from selling Auto Trader magazine.

https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2016/04/will-the-guardian-now-...

Yes some what ironic given there role in the paradise papers etc newspapers and the media are always do what I say not what I or my owner does

For most papers, I'd say it's safe to assume the editorial staff do not make financial decisions.

What they (the finance department) do (minimization of their tax bill) is legal and sensible and necessary for the paper's survival. If it were not and this was known to the staff, it would be no excuse morally or legally to say that the staff 'don't make these decisions'.

Are the editorial staff allowed to report on the financial decisions of their owners?

Yes. If you follow the chain of articles back to its end you will find: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2008/may/03/1

A report by the Guardian on the very same topic.

1) The Guardian doesn't have an 'owner'as such, it is owned by a trust.

2) It did make this deal offshore but it didn't save then tax. Good links above on this

Just checking the references in this article. The offshore tax claim seems to be referenced to "Guido Fawkes" (https://order-order.com/ "Guido Fawkes Blog of plots, rumours and conspiracy") which seems to be a collection of conspiracy articles about all kinds of stuffs, written by this guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Staines

Staines is a piece of work but very well connected. Conspiracies, yes, but not conspiracy theories. He's as establishment as a libertarian blogger could hope to be in the UK.

Fawkes is a well respected media-watch type site in the UK. They're humorous, but respected - think The Register but for media.

How would offshore tax structures help them, considering they're making losses at the moment?

It was the profit from the sale of Auto Trader magazine.

There's some further analysis of their finances and strategy in this recent piece from The Drum: http://www.thedrum.com/opinion/2017/10/26/how-the-guardian-f...

Also worth noting: Jimmy Wales is on the Guardian's board.

Not since April of this year.

> This, in essence, moved the sense of their product from quality content to clickable content

The same problem exists with paid subscribers / buyers. Just compare the circulation numbers of British tabloids to those of high quality British newspapers (which don't really exist anymore. Even the Independent and (to a lesser extent) the Guardian have moved toward pandering to their audience.)

Back in the day, a typical newspaper made about 80% of it's revenue from advertisers (including the classifieds), and about 80% of its costs were printing & distribution. So free Internet distribution should have been 80% of the revenue at 20% of the cost... :)

There is probably not as much money in ads as there used to be.

In the good old days there was no alternative to print media ads. Today there is so much more ad space available.

Nearly all the revenue in ads has now been captured by Google and Facebook, which is the far greater challenge for publishers.

The money is definitely still there in ads, and growing nicely! As others have pointed out, Google and Facebook have hoovered up the lion's share of the new revenue for themselves, which is arguably starving off the wider ad-supported ecosystem in many ways.

How much have production costs dropped from print to the web? I'm guessing it's not 80%, but it should be a fairly substantial amount.

How much were the classifieds pulling in before in that 80%, do you know? I know classifieds used to be huge.

Craigslist could probably pull in multiple billions a year in profit and 10 figures in revenue if they went for revenue a lot more. Company value would probably be close to eBay level.

Also, unlike ads, which make you chase page views at all costs, paid subscribers will incentivize you to keep writing quality content, otherwise they will quit. Even if they sign-up because of a few sensationalist articles, they will eventually get bored with them, when they'll realize that 9 times out of 10 the headlines are just clickbait.

If you make your content only available for paid subscribers than it doesn't get talked about. If you don't get talked about you lose the importance of being the so-called "newspaper of record". And if you don't get talked about you lose the new subscribers that come from word of mouth. In the old days there was just a few options available in a city and a handful of national papers. Today there is an almost infinite selection of available content. They also had the classifieds. This allowed business models that are not possible today.

> If you make your content only available for paid subscribers than it doesn't get talked about

This doesn’t seem to apply to the Financial Times or the Wall Street Journal.

Having a market catering to an older, richer, and more data driven niche has it's advantages. They are subject to some the same pressures as newspapers, but likely will gain effect at a later time frame then more general newspapers. They also deliver data that is more niche, and less likely to be delivered by alternate channels.

Also, individuals paying for a subscription have no effect on the editorial line of a given newspaper. There's been a case recently in France where a billionaire was involved in the infamous Paradise Papers. Some newspaper wrote a lengthy piece about it and it turns out said billionaire pulled 600.000 euros of ads from the outlet a few weeks later. Totally coincidental of course :)

That cannot really happen with actual subscribers. They can pull their subscription en masse if the editorial line doesn't please them, but they cannot endanger the livelihood of the newspaper as one fell swoop like that.

37Signals said the same thing about applications. Better to have 10,000 users at $30 per month than 100 at $3,000 per month.

If a single customer is paying a lot, then you are tempted to make whatever changes they ask for to your application, and it's harder to stand up against featuritis or illogical design.

Basecamp example is good but they do veer a bit away in terms of pricing. The price is too low still for any customer to have pull, but at $100/month, it also leaves out a lot of people. Not sure if there's a point in any of this. I guess I'm just adding on. Since the saying still works if $30 or $100 a month.

Mind, it would really help if I could get the newspaper I actually want delivered to where I live. Call me snooty, but I want to read the New York Times, not the Boston Globe. The Globe isn't local enough for those of us living outside Boston proper, but it just doesn't have the national- and global-scale content of the Times.

I agree that content quality and revenue source are related in this way. There are bunch of analogies online, that I think help fill out this picture.

Youtube “monetisation” spawned a bunch of clickbait-driven spam. Patreon produced good quality content, acting on the same platform, at the same time. This is somewhere between a subscriber and supporter model. A lot like some newspapers. Almost a natural experiment.

In terms of operational scale, patreon’s “creators” are kind of similar to journalists. It takes similar sums to support the work, and they’re on similar timescales. This makes me think a similar model might work for journalism, though maybe not for newspapers.

Podcasting is another possibly useful comparison. Very little clickbait (earbait?) ever crosses my radar. Podcasts are usually ad supported, but there’s still no way to SEO or clickbait your way to a win. To succeeds a podcast needs subscriptions, usually free. Even @ free, the need to attract a dedicated subscriber base encourages the same sort of focus on the same audience. Slow & steady growth. Win more subscribers than you lose…

This example is messier, but I think it shows that the rules are rules of thumb.

Basically, the path to success needs to depend on quality for quality to be likely. Subscribers are generally quality sensitive. I dunno how to formulate a principle exactly, but it feels like there is something here somewhere.

I've been working on making this model for journalists a reality https://www.demotico.com. So far, I haven't found excited journalists but that may just be me being a poor marketer.

Sadly at this point i wonder if "clickbait" is ingrained into the corriculum. I see even national broadcasters adopt such headlines, even though they do not rely on ads to fund their services.

> Years ago it was obvious to most newspapers that paid subscribers are their lifeline. Advertisers come and go, daily sales come and go, but long-period subscribers keep you afloat.

[Citation required]. In the era of paper newspapers advertisers were the bulk of revenue. Hi subs were needed to show advertisers that the publication was worth advertising in. It's not like the idea of CPI is a new one!

As far as Polish media go, I really like:

oko.press - the best investigative journalism in Poland. They proclaim to focus 2/3 of their coverage on ruling party and 1/3 on the rest. Time will tell if they are honest with that. The strategy makes sense, because government has the most power.

wp.pl - while it has very clickbaity headlines, it's surprisingly balanced when it comes to point of view. Polish political scene and society is currently very polarized. I determined that wp is quite balanced by the fact that they cover both opposition and ruling party news. They carry articles critical of both ruling party and opposition. Make no mistake, WP is a tabloid, but it also has occasional very long articles and interviews, and those are quality journalism. On the other hand, they reprint kremlin propaganda from rt.com like Ukrainians who crucified children in Donbas without fact checking.

The bottom line is I use wp.pl for quick news (it acts as a front guard) and oko.press for fact checking.

As far as paper newspapers, Angora is my favourite. It shamelessly reprints articles from not just Poland but often from foreign papers, and it's interesting to read about Poland from a foreign point of view.

I had high hopes for oko.press but since they seem to have 3/3 negative coverage of the ruling party, and not in an investigative way, but kind of sensational in headlines, I got disappointed. But Angora is an outlet I forgot about but remember very positively, I need to check it out again.

Press has no duty to be positive towards anyone. Critical thinking is what they do and they're very good at it. They often criticize the government, but they stick to facts and check their facts. Surely you don't blame them for pointing out falsehoods ? Why don't you instead blame people who lie ? Whenever an opposition member makes a false statement they point it out too.

Slightly off-topic, but I just went on http://www.gazetaprawna.pl/ and was rather turned off by the auto-playing video/audio (that I could not find the source of).

Hmm I use a browser that disables auto play by default. I bet there’s an add-on for that.

in a society with such dramatic wealth inequality, subscription can never be a viable business model for journalism. If you aren't charging people more based on how much they have, You're not going to be able to make it up on quantity, since most people have zero disposable income.

Donations, however, scale with the inverse of the "marginal utility of money". Even though donations are completely voluntary, because they scale with wealth, at some level of wealth inequality, they become more profitable than a subscription service at any price point.

(ad revenue also ostensibly scales with wealth, but not as well, since consumption doesn't scale very well with wealth)

I completely agree.

Here in France, there are few truly independent newspapers, all the big ones like Le Monde, Liberation, Le Figaro are owned by billionaires like Niel, Drahi or Dassault. It's quite dangerous as it breaks the independence of these newspaper (for example Niel declared in 2011: "When journalists are bothering me, I buy a share of their fucking newspaper, and they leave me alone").

It's quite dangerous.

The quality of these newspaper also tends to go to "click-baity" contents and it's really annoying. A few years ago, I interviewed for a position at Le Monde (as a sysadmin, not as a journalist), and from what I understood, there was rampant tensions in the redaction between those coming from the web publication and those coming from the "paper" one (the two were historically separated), no wonders...

They still reveal major scandals from time to time (ex: Le Monde and the Panama Papers), but it is rarer than it used to.

Fortunately there are a few independent newspapers, the 2 main ones in France being "Le canard enchaine", which is still "full paper", no website (it's a weekly however), and the other one being Mediapart, which is an online only, ads free, subscription based newspaper.

I subscribed to Mediapart a few years ago. It was at the time a complete emotional reaction after Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris. But more than 2 years later, I still subscribe to it, and keep reading it daily. One of the big dimension of why I keep paying for it (it's around ~10 euros/month) is that it's a way to support a free and independent press (the other being simply to stay informed).

There is clearly room for an independent and quality press. It doesn't take that much subscriptions to maintain a decently sized newspaper, 100 000 subscribers at 10e/m gives you enough revenue to sustain around 100 employees.

The press is a powerful counter balance of the political. It should remain that way. It will if a somewhat large number of individuals agree to pay for it.

US and UK publishing businesses are radically different in subscription revenues. They have traditionally made up a tiny proportion for UK publishers.

A quick review of UK print media

1) The Times - Rupert Murdoch mouthpiece. Employs MP Michael Gove for £100k a year after he was sacked for being a backstabber.

2) The Mail - "The EU and immigrants want to kill your children and sleep with your sister and may even affect your house price". Billionaire owner too.

3) The Telegraph - "The Torygraph" former paper of the ruling classes, now mouth piece of two weird billionaire brothers who live in a castle on an island like particularly boring bond villains.

4) The Express - "Princes Diana wanted Brexit". Owned by billionaire Richard "not a pornographer" Desmond

5) The Sun - Rupert Murdoch's gutter mouthpiece

6) The News of the World - Rupert's other paper that had to close because they hacked the voice mail of a girl who was murdered, and therefore delayed the police investigation.

7) The Mirror - low grade leftism, but mostly celeb gossip

8) The Financial Times - Pretty good journalism and then pages of bond prices etc

9) The Independent. No longer in print. Billionaire Arab and Russian owners

edit: from comments there is a number 10

10) The i - a lower case Independent. Thinner, cheaper and still in print. This main use for the i seems to be to leave it on train seats when the Metro (a free paper they give out in railway stations) is just too cheap. The journalism seems OK. Owned by establishment media PLC

So if you didn't want Brexit, think immigration is helping demographics, think Princess Di should be laid to rest now and don't think the world is full of benefit scroungers, there is only the Guardian left.

edit: formatting and a sad inability to list numbers

You missed the i.

Well, if we're doing quick parody headlines as stand-ins, it's actually impossible to out-Guardian the Guardian:

"I dread the day my daughter's poos get smaller" https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/08/dread-...

"Tea is a national disgrace"

"Robots are racist and sexist, just like the people who created them"

In any case, good on them for proving out this revenue model, hopefully it's sustainable and we see gigantic yellow-orange beg-boxes on more online media (seriously)

> "Robots are racist and sexist, just like the people who created them"

to quote the simpsons, "it's funny because it's true."

(still, funny comment, i upvoted, fwiw)

I do normally love to hate on the Guardian, but that is from their 'comment is free' opinion section, rather than the main news site. BBC and many others have these, which are basically just magazine format and of little journalistic value (although to be fair they do not claim to be).

My favourite: "How ancient lentils reveal the origins of social inequality"

https://amp.theguardian.com/science/2017/oct/11/lentils-orig...

But that one comes from the researchers themselves:

>The weakening of a strong communal ideology surrounding food production and storage increased the potential for dominant families to emerge, either through consistently greater success, or through force or unequal conditions of exchange. This in turn created the preconditions of specialisation and social inequality upon which urban life was founded in Mesopotamia.

(and that conjecture was based on lentils found by archaeologists)

The Telegraph's political editor resigned because (he claims) the paper spiked stories about HSBC, after they threatened to pull advertising. So there's that as well. Alongside Murdoch's control of the Times, it's a pity there isn't a more decent centre-right paper.

As a literally card-carrying socialist, i'd pick the Financial Times over the Guardian. They write about stuff that is actually important, in what seems like an intelligent and even-handed way. And the pages of bond prices are good for standing your muddy boots on.

I grew up in a Guardian-reading household, and i want to like it, but it's too full of self-absorbed middle-class metropolitan smugness. And i'm a smug self-absorbed middle-class metropolitan, so i should know.

As an American of similar political leanings, I feel the same way about NYTimes households. I also find myself reading FT, WSJ and Bloomberg for more "important" stories as well.

I don't think the Guardian is all good, but since it is free you can skip the bits you don't like. I read a mix of the Guardian, WSJ, NYT, Economist, generally any quality paper that lets you freeload a bit. I am just a dabbler by nature. I used to get the Economist, but when I found the pile of copies still in their cellophane by my chair had grown to 12 I canceled it. I still buy it now and then. I like the New European too. It's real echo chamber, but the way some people seem to get annoyed just by it existing is worth the cover price. In fact a great sport is to go into WH Smith on a Friday and put it in front of the Daily Hate Mail and stand back watch the grumpy old men grimace as they have to touch it to move it out of the way. Classic.

As an aside another sport which is not nearly popular enough is to pick up the pile of Daily Heil's at the supermarket and to place them in the toilet paper aisle. This actually caught on for a while. some people enjoy pushing pro EU leaflets inside them with the junk mail....

Although not a newspaper, I find the Economist to have similar traits to your list for the FT. They'll also go properly in depth with many stories (multiple pages)

I like the economist a lot. They are a lot more ideological than the FT, though. As long as you bear that in mind while reading, it's still a good read.

Private Eye is also a remarkably good, although very specific, and often extremely depressing, read.

>because they hacked the voice mail of a girl who was murdered, and therefore delayed the police investigation.

This sounds like a fabricated implication. Lots of people (famous ones) were hacked, and I can't find a sign that delaying a police investigation caused the NOTW to nosedive.

I'm sorry, but rigorous logical argument seemed out of place in any discussion of the NOTW. I thought condensing their sad sad criminal behavior into one sound bite was absolutely in keeping with their style.

Wikipedia has a primer on the News of the world, Milly Dowler and Andy Coulson. I suspect a formal discussion over why the paper actually closed (popularly to save the criminal investigation from going upwards to the owners) could fill a very sad book.

FT is now owned by Nikkei fwiw.

I would love to see a similar review of US media (print or digital). Where is the good stuff?

>So if you didn't want Brexit, think immigration is helping demographics, think Princess Di should be laid to rest now and don't think the world is full of benefit scroungers, there is only the Guardian left.

So, we should only read newspapers that agree with our world view?

I only read articles that

1) are not peddaling hate and devision

2) are not celeb gossip

3) interest me

I would be suprised if that made me more idealistic than the majority of HN crowd?

Does the FT actually still print the share prices? I guess maybe the older demographic likes that. The majority of their subscribers are online now so I guess never notice. Their online only content makes the print edition much worse.

You sound like an ideal Private Eye subscriber.

Current affairs, investigative journalism, literary criticism, Commentatorballs, [That's enough. Ed]

Edited by the great, and clean, Ian Hislop.

Private Eye and The Economist are really the only titles worth subscribing to [I subscribe to both]. Private Eye is the only news outlet that takes investigative journalism seriously these days too.

I love Private Eye! The last journalists

Now imagine how much more they'd make if they actually published quality material instead of culture war clickbait and freshman opinion pieces. 'Member when The Guardian was one of the outlets boldly reporting the Snowden and Manning leaks? I member.

Right now on their front page I can read how democracy is being undermined "by not distinguishing between fact and opinion". And you know what? They're right on this front. But they categorically refuse to point the fingers at all guilty parties, and instead stick to the targets that are politically opportune and which they are ideologically opposed to.

e.g. I have yet to see any mainstream outlet bother to mention that Reddit's default news and political subs turned into pro-Hillary/anti-Trump mouthpieces in the months leading up to the US election, an effect that was presumably related to the millions her campaign pumped into Correct The Record, and which had a _huge_ effect in creating and calcifying the "right wing hate subreddits" they now hysterically complain about.

e.g. I don't see anyone talking anymore about how the US pwned European infrastructure and broke into politicians' accounts (including Merkel's). But when Russia is said to be _attempting_ this, it is presented as akin to cybernetic warfare. Well in that case, America has been fighting WW3 under our noses, and they are equally reprehensible for doing so. Otherwise, this is simply how the game is being played, and all is fair in love and war. Which one is it? Because "muh russia" isn't a consistent stance on this. The response appears to be for suspiciously many people to start posting complaints about "whataboutism", in a spontaneous attempt at misdirection away from the hypocrisy. How curious.

I get your frustration but the answer is less money.

I agree. Ever since Snowden they have been going to absolute horse shit.

examples: https://somuchguardian.tumblr.com

most recent example: basically calling Taylor swift a white supremacist for being silent on politics https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/nov/24/the-gu...

I can't take them seriously anymore, their editorial board has gone mad

Thanks so much for that link. As a "progressive leaning" individual I have despaired at the descent of the Guardian, along with much of the formerly progressive media, into pure political-correctness-gone-mad, value-signalling nonsense, especially as I'm white, male and not getting any younger (apparently there are some demographics it's still just fine to build very negative stereotypes about...) It's good to counter that despair with the humour of collecting the maddest headlines together. Perhaps the Guardian really is just a clever, ironic, self-parodying send up thesedays?

It's funny that you mention parody. I recently came across this guy, who says he can't parody feminism anymore, because they've gone completely mad https://medusamagazine.com/i-created-medusa-magazine-and-i-a... :D

I remember seeing an article from them arguing that we get rid of white emoji to punish white people for racism written by someone woman with pink hair and half her head shaved. Ever since then I've wondered if they're actually doing journalism, if they're actively trying to sabotage the left, or if they're really just that off their fucking rocker.

I can't say that's a surprising headline for them anymore

Meh, it's an opinion column, and fairly innofensive at that. In the same period, the NYTimes had an opinion article literally called:

"To Stop Iran’s Bomb, Bomb Iran"

I prefer the war on the white emoji, personally.

The Guardian on "Correct the record":

https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Awww.theguardian.com+%...

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/oct/13/wikile...

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/sep/15/bernie-sande...

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/may/17/when-is-a-ca...

> "Correct the Record, that is solely focused on defending her record."

> “Correct the Record”, a rapid rebuttal unit

Portraying them as some sort of superhero warriors/defenders is precisely what OP was talking about.

I don't think we read the same links. "defending" and "rebuttal" are in none of the links I gave.

> e.g. I don't see anyone talking anymore about how the US pwned European infrastructure and broke into politicians' accounts (including Merkel's).

The Guardian did, however, break the story of the connection between the Brexit campaign and Bannon and Cambridge Analytica and Mercer et al. See Carole Cadwalleder's long series on this

Sure. But did they break the story on the connection between anti-brexit organizations? It's funny how the guardian mostly published anti-brexit propaganda.

> Sure. But did they break the story on the connection between anti-brexit organizations?

If you think there is a story here report it to the Electoral commission. I'm sure they could run this in parallel with the Arron Banks investigation

> It's funny how the guardian mostly published anti-brexit propaganda.

Leaving the pro-Brexit camp with just The Times. Oh and the Mail... and the Express, the Sun, the Telegraph....

The Times endorsed Remain during the referendum campaign.

I was a subscriber back then. Endorsed, with their fingers crossed behind their backs.

> Now imagine how much more they'd make if they actually published quality material instead of culture war clickbait and freshman opinion pieces.

Won't this crowdfunding potentially polarize journalism even more? In general, individuals are more passionate about their political opinions and social causes than for neutral, high-quality journalism which sometimes confirms, sometimes rejects their world-views. You also invite strong pressures from well funded special interest groups, seeking to borrow on the credibility of journalism to promote a particular world view.

At the very least, it's much harder to get businesses to openly profess a particular political view. Often those which do face huge backlash and more ill-will towards their brands than the good-will they're trying to foster with ads.

I don't understand. What you call "crowdfunding" I'd just call "subscription", which is how all journalism was paid for until fairly recently. You're really arguing that openly corporate-funded "journalism" would be superior, and have a lesser tendency to promote a particular angle, like, say, the capitalism-cures-all-ills mantra?

It's "no win" right? Whomever the news source is financially dependent on they at the mercy of that funding source's interest in neutrality. And since journalism costs money it will always be financially dependent on someone/thing. While a business may be wary about weighing in on a politically charged issue just to attempt to foster supporters good will (for exactly the reasons you discuss) the calculus is different when that issue directly affects their business. I'm not concerned about advertisers biasing news about unrelated hot button political issues. I'm worried about advertisers biasing news in favor of their business interests: corporate tax rates, trade agreements, consumer and environmental safety concerns - etc. Things that could be good for making the business money, but not good for people. I don't have those same concerns about individuals, but I'd have the (similar) concerns you bring up. The question then is what bias are you more comfortable with?

I have to agree, the Guardian has degenerated substantially. I think the stuff on the Panama papers is good, but a lot of the content seems to be loony-leftie territory, and very divisive.

Then there's the constant undercurrent of finger-wagging superiority.

The right-wing UK press have a superiority complex too, which I'd describe more as arrogant than finger-wagging. I'd generally rather read the guardian than most of the rest, but TBH in this day and age I'd be happy enough to watch them all sink without a trace.

Long live the BBC. Now if they can just clone David Attenborough and get the clones to read the news and pretty much any other factual programs, we'd be on to a winner.

The BBC has its own problems. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2003/jul/04/Iraqandthemedi...

It's certainly not perfect, but I'll take it over the rest of what's on offer the vast majority of the time.

And 14 years is a long old time...

FWIW I agree with the findings in that piece, the BBC were too shy about holding the government to account during the buildup to the Iraq war.

Me too, I will use BBC for most news.

14 years is long but the power dynamic hasn't changed: they still rely on the government's blessing in one way or another.

You and a friend go to a house on halloween and there's a bowl that says take one. You sheepishly take two, and your friend, after you, empties the entire bowl into his sack.

You ask of him, outraged, "How could you do such a malicious thing?!" and he responds, "Me?!?! what about you?!"

This is whataboutism, and yeah, you're guilty of it. Our right wing is at least two orders of magnitude more corrupt than our left wing. Pointing fingers at "all guilty parties" means pointing fingers almost exclusively at republicans.

I'd caveat this by saying that corrupt democrats do exist; not every democrat is pure and truthful. Far from it, a good swathe of them are likely just politicians with their own self interest. The left is very much not sunshine and rainbows.

However, you are correct in noting that the parent commenter desperately wants to paint both sides as biased, guilty, and debased, in order to excuse the wrongdoings of the cause he fervently supports.

"If I can convince myself that everyone did what we did, then there's nothing wrong if we continue to do it!"

Ah, projection; the mark of the politically insecure.

You presumably don't mean "99% of democrats are not pure and truthful." Did you mean that apart from 1% bad apples, they are? Because what you wrote condemns 99% of them. Difference between "not everyone is pure" and "everyone is not pure".

Good point, but I did actually mean to put down 99% of democrat leaders. To be "pure and truthful" to me is a high standard, which most of our representatives do not currently meet.

I have updated my comment to clarify.

Saying 99% of almost any group is not pure and truthful is probably much closer to the truth than a small fraction like 1%. And I'm assuming we aren't literally meaning completely pure and truthful either. Still has me think the original statement is closer to the truth.

Democrats in America are no saints. Just compared to Republicans, in my opinion, they comparatively are much better.

Both sides perceive the outgroup as the source of all evil in the world. You could replace left/right and republican/democrat in your comment and there would be people on the other side who sincerely believe it as much as you do.

Neither claim is accurate.

For those curious, I'd recommend looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_equivalence or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_balance.

Sometimes, right and wrong isn't always obvious. To know one from another may require effort and thought.

Often times, the truth is somewhere in the middle, and so we develop instincts that ensure we can take a step back and not immediately point fingers.

That's good; most of us don't think of ourselves as political idiots, where any dog whistle will make us jump through hoops, raging at some invisible enemy.

But there are times when the truth clearly falls much more on one side than the other. And in those times, saying "well I thought both parties were wrong, but it turns out that one was and is right" can be a rather scary prospect!

But I think it's better to be a little embarrassed than to run away from the world's problems.

We probably don't share the same values, and would not be able to reach consensus on the "right side."

This is an acceptable and unavoidable situation that technocrats need to learn to live with. People will want different outcomes, and will have different moral matrices. People on the left and right will each disagree with the other side's characterization of their politician's sins.

Edit: Just want to note that the parent comment was substantially edited in ways that might make this comment seem weird.

People on both sides pretty much share the same values; social issues are a big exception, but the crux of the disagreement between the right and left very often comes down to a disagreement about facts on the ground (e.g. lowering taxes on the rich creates jobs, net-neutrality harms customers and innovation, a minimally regulated market provides better and cheaper healthcare than single-payer, human behavior has no or negligible impact on climate etc)

>People on both sides pretty much share the same values

Sorry but I think you are significantly mistaken. To give two examples of statements that are common from each side. "Homosexuality is sinful" and "All white people are racist." The two sides are so far apart that when someone makes one of those statements they feel they are making an obvious non-controversial statement but it is offensive to the other side.*

This is because each side is so far apart they cannot even agree on what words mean. Combine this with the ease at which someone can become offended and it makes discussion almost impossible.

*I can either or both statements if requested.

As I already said: social issues are a big exception, but research shows that social issues are very low on the totem-pole relative to facts based issues. Additionally, I don't think either statement is very common, those examples illustrate extreme individuals that are motivated by hate rather than by a disagreement about particular values. Ironically, your example illustrates my point pretty well since the black community tends to vote for liberal politicians even though they share religious and traditional values with conservatives. The reason for this is a disagreement about which policies are effective not about values, and we saw this play out in the 2016 election when Trump specifically addressed black voters with promises of more jobs, better education, and lower crime rates in black communities.

> Sometimes, right and wrong isn't always obvious. To know one from another may require effort and thought.

The problem is that much of the progressive movement is convinced that not only do they have all the right answers, but that their conclusions are not up for debate. To even open up a dialogue on transgender issues (for example) is considered harmful, violent, toxic, hateful.

This happens over and over, but here is this week's example: http://nationalpost.com/news/canada/heres-the-full-recording...

I disagree with the right on almost everything, but the left has serious problems that it needs to work out before it can claim to be the party of truth.

This seems like relativism run amok. All political positions are not equal except in a completely unmoored ethical system.

I don't subscribe to an objective morality. There are things that I value and attempt to maximize, but I don't feel the need to compel all sentients in the universe to adopt my position.

I'm willing to "live and let live," with the understanding that conflict will still happen sometimes and that's okay.

There need not be an objective morality for us to bring our values into our politics.

Politics is the way we make collective decisions about things of mutual importance. What's important to you?

What would a society full of people who refuse to advocate for their own values out of a sense of meta-ethical relativism look like?

I'm not telling you not to bring your values into politics.

I'm not some kind of relativism evangelist. That's a strawman that multiple commenters here are standing up.

This all started with one commenter saying that his outgroup is uniquely evil, and me replying that it was a matter of perspective. Both sides get to bring their values into politics.

Saying evil is a matter of perspective is relativism.

This is going to drift into a problem of definitions, as value conflicts often can. If your deontology considers me "evil," there's nothing I can do about that. I'm not going to complain about your use of the word.

People are going to have conflicts, and some of them are going to become holy wars. Best of luck in the wars to come.

"People are going to have conflicts, and some of them are going to become holy wars. Best of luck in the wars to come."

What does this mean? I'm genuinely interested in your perspective, not trying to play gotcha or argue semantics.

If I recall correctly, the leadership of LessWrong espouses "Politics is the mindkiller".

Consequently, their followers will find all manners of justification to avoid applying their rationality to political subjects, in the guise of some holier-than-thou enlightenment.

Ironically, this actually helps to sustain their membership. Broaching politics would risk schisms within their enervated movement, as a group who believes "Global Warming is irrational" but wouldn't otherwise discuss it, would be forced to confront an opposing group which does.

The language is tricky in this area; I'll try to be clear. There seems some confusion in your concepts; at least I'm confused about them. I don't claim to have this stuff all worked out; sorry if it's not helpful.

It sounds like, for you, 'subscribing to an objective morality' would involve feeling the need to make everyone 'adopt your position' - share your beliefs? do as you do?

I don't think there are actually many ethical or social relativists at all. Even the most self-proclaimedly relativist academics may talk like that professionally, but in their everyday lives have quite another standard, and evidently believe in objective ethics/morality/reality etc. That's the thing about ethics; it's not like favourite ice cream flavour, where you might think lemon is best, chocolate awful, but understand it's just your personal taste. Believing something is ethically wrong means it's not just 'wrong for you', but 'wrong, full stop.' It doesn't mean you go around forcing people to think/act the same. (Although probably means you wish they would.)

I think you have described tolerance, an understanding that people think differently, not everyone has the same values etc. But to go from that to thinking there is no right and wrong, good or bad - only right-for-you, wrong-for-you - well, that's an abysmal step. I suppose you don't mean that; I hope not. Well, even in your "I don't feel the need to compel all sentients in the universe to adopt my position" it sounds like you think it's simply a better way of acting than others who need to compel etc. Not just better-for-you, but better for anyone, better for everyone i.e. objectively better.

You talk about something being: 'wrong, full stop'

How can you tell if this full stop "wrongness" is occurring?

Any answer you give is going to be an explanation of how the full stop "wrong" thing violates some set of principles or reduces something you value. Not all people will agree on which principles or values to privilege as the arbiters of right and wrong.

The whole thing will become a game of definitions.

To your last point: No. My way of looking at things is not "better" in any cosmic sense. My question would be:

"Better at what?"

I value what I value. You value what you value. There's a whole planet of people with their values. Many will align, many will conflict. This is normal.

I don't believe those with values different from mine are "wrong, full stop" or "evil, full stop."

'How can you tell if this full stop "wrongness" is occurring?' Well, I get why you would ask this, but that's an extremely strange question; I sense false assumptions in there somewhere.

Yes, "wrong, full stop", otherwise known as wrong. That's what the word 'wrong' means in English. I had to create terms because you are (what seems to me) pretending you 'have no need of' any judgement-words whatsoever.

You, I presume, and I don't kill people in the normal course of a day, e.g. because they have something we want. I think that would be wrong. So does almost everyone, the religious & spiritual traditions etc. It's based on natural feeling, and also on what makes for human flourishing.

"Because not everyone agrees on what is right and wrong, there can be no such thing", you seem to be saying. If not everyone agrees on who is most beautiful, that means there's no such thing as beauty?

The way you talk of 'values' came in, I believe, with Nietzsche and post-Nietzschean relativism. There's something profoundly macabre about talking the way you do, in spite or because of its all-levelling blandness. I'm very curious about your influences in learning to speak and think like that - who are they? (You have to be very smart indeed to not understand good and bad, right and wrong.)

Say there's a guy who does go around killing people on the slightest pretext. You don't think there's anything wrong with that, he just has different values, (yours are no better) and that's normal?

I think that way of talking as if everything, from whether murder is ok to what music I like to listen to, is on an equivalent plane of 'values', erases essential and major distinctions, to say the least.

So..for example, I can't imagine you would be interested in thinking about or discussing what broad direction your society/town/institution should be heading, because no direction would be better or worse than another? Or if you have a preference, well, so does everyone else.

You have sympathy for those terrible singers (whoops, there's no bad singers?) on American Idol when they say, in answer to the judges' "You're terrible!", "That's just your opinion"? But there are better opinions and worse. Better and worse reasons for judgments and interpretations, etc.

Well, I still feel the way you're talking is ultimately incoherent, and that underneath it you hold the common sense view, even if I've not managed to break through yet. At least you won't let yourself say that you understand this, or anything at all, better than me. :-) But it seems you do think you have a better understanding of what we're talking about than I do. It seems you think I, and almost everyone, are wrong to believe in objective morality. But you can't say that, so...most people just have different values to yours?

I notice you again say 'in any cosmic sense'; before it was 'all sentients in the universe'. The way everday language is used offends some sense of due human modesty in you, or something? Maybe it's from thinking that everyday language presupposes a God's eye 'view from nowhere'. Well, I get that, I realize there's no right or wrong out there except inside creatures' brains.

If a stranger were to come up and punch you in the face, you wouldn't think it was, uh, wrong? How about if someone killed your girlfriend for the fun of it? Replying "That's fine, you just have different values" wouldn't sound more enlightened, it would insanely brainwashed.

>I don't believe those with values different from mine are "wrong, full stop" or "evil, full stop."< You thought I was saying that? Well, with that word 'values' putting everything in one basket, from ice-cream to murder, I can see how would be possible to reach conclusions such as yours, and talk that way. It does seem there's a faulty argument or two somewhere though.

There's so much strawman nonsense in this comment I don't even know where to begin.

I don't go around murdering people because doing so would harm the society I live in and care about, i.e. harm things I value. I support stopping people from murdering for the same reason. I don't have to believe in some kind of naive "wrongness" to take a position on something.

Your position is that a simple and intuitive sense of "wrong" is easily derived. So let me know if abortion is "right" or "wrong." Should be easy to do, right?

People will come down on drastically different sides of that issue, and neither will be correct in an objective sense. It will depend on their values and moral matrices.

To be honest, I don't have a lot of hope I'll get anywhere with you. This comment makes you seem like a retard.

"Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say face-to-face. Don't be snarky. Comments should get more civil and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

It's less a system of thought and more a way to think less.

If truth does not exist for a person, then that person can stand, sneering on the sidelines at those who dare stand up for whatever this or whatever that. Or they can squirrel themselves away, safe in their own make believe world.

Some people need that illusory superiority or distance to get through life.

At least until they hear a knock at the door at night.

This is a cutting attack on those who fail to support your ingroup.

Well done.

I recommend steelmanning my comment and seeing if there's another interpretation of my position you can find. Me not sharing your values is not equal to me disbelieving in objective reality.

> Pointing fingers at "all guilty parties" means pointing fingers almost exclusively at republicans.

Almost exclusively? That's definitely an unhelpful exaggeration. I agree with the spirit of your analogy, but even invoking the term "exclusively" when referring to political behavior, qualifiers or not, is going to undermine your argument.

Alright, say you had to sort them from most guilty to least guilty. I don't have the resources to do this, but start listing off republicans until you find one who is "less guilty" than a democrat. How many places on this list does that take you? Probably more than 100.

>most guilty to least guilty

Guilty of what precisely?

It is clear from the context that I am talking about corruption

We have an NJ senator going through a corruption case right now. And he's seeming like he will be saved because the Supreme Court allowed certain amounts of corruption before so he's only getting off because we made some stuff legal. I'm guessing he isn't at the back of a hypothetical list. Most democrats who talk about him are also in support of him if I'm not mistaken. There's also the behind the scenes supporting of Hillay over Bernie. If not outright corruption and collusion.

This doesn't mean Democrats are as bad as Republicans, but they aren't the saints you're making them out to be.

right, in my example, they take two candies. my point is not that the democrats aren't somewhat corrupt, but that the level of scope insensitivity that you have to have not to see a difference between republicans and democrats should probably count as a disability.

>Our right wing is at least two orders of magnitude more corrupt than our left wing.

How is that?

Maybe this is easier to understand when looking across the borders, to the extremists.

Here in Germany I often hear the phrase: "Left extremists set fire to cars, right extremists set fire to people."

Of course this is oversimplified, yet there is quite some truth in it.

Maybe. I think the reverse is as true.

A right wing extremist would technically be more like someone who destroys traffic lights and stop signs. The political left believes in the idea of government and authority, the right wants to be left alone.

You're talking about libertarians. There are also right-wingers who are authoritarians. Those are the ones who are more of a problem at the moment, and the ones that have, to put it mildly, historically been more of a problem in Germany.

Maybe there are cultural differences between Europe and the US. "Right extremists" might be simply different here. In most European countries, right extremists call for a strong (nationalist) state and authoritarian structures, while left extremists are closer to anarchists.

Here, right extremists set fire on refugee accommodations and are rude to, thrash or even murder foreign-looking people as well as homeless people. Their enemies are the strangers and the weak people.

Left extremists set fire on cars and other perceived status symbols of richness, and try to fight with the police. Their enemy is the capitalism in general and the state in particular.

The left extremists also did kill people, but mostly in the 1970s (see RAF [1]), while the right extremists kill lots of people all the time (see NSU [2] for a recent example).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Army_Faction

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Socialist_Underground

The Guardian is the only British newspaper that genuinely makes me laugh. Every now and then it gets so tied up in knots with its internal contradictions that it intellectually implodes.

Corbyn's been the main cause of that recently. Even the leftie journalists were starting to get a bit twitchy that he might actually do something leftie.

As I'm writing this, the UK edition is leading with Prince Harry marrying (presumably republicans can like royals). It's running alongside an opinion piece stating that the marriage will change Britain's relationship with race forever. Not entirely clear why other than there has to be a gender/sexuality/race angle (just because). So that story's shaping up nicely.

It's the Independent that was the overtly republican paper, I'm not sure if the Guardian is?

> I have yet to see any mainstream outlet bother to mention that Reddit's default news and political subs turned into pro-Hillary/anti-Trump mouthpieces in the months leading up to the US election

Presumably because that didn't happen in the slightest, but I'll forgive your lapse of memory. Before the nomination, all the presumably "left-leaning" subreddits (like /r/politics) were firmly in Sanders' camp and out for Clinton's head. After the nomination the battleground only intensified, and the schism continued through the election. Meanwhile, the news subreddits like /r/news and /r/worldnews oscillated wildly between pro-Republican and pro-Democrat, major subs like /r/trees were vaguely pro-Trump (on balance, /r/TwoXChromosomes was vaguely pro-Clinton), and /r/all was completely overrun at all hours of the day by /r/the_donald's successful exploitation of Reddit's front page algorithm. Anyone claiming that Reddit was "pro-Hillary" must have been in a coma for all of 2016 (not that I blame them, I bet half of us here wish we had been too).

It's possible for a newspaper to publish a mix of quality material as well as more generally popular material... it might even be an objective to to that depending on your business model.

The Guardian is not different from any other Tabloid, except the viewership is the left higher class. The journalists still mispresent data and exploit racial/gender tensions to make bucks. I used to read it every day, now I only look at the environment section.

That certainly highlights the importance of the right UX, but I wish they had invested in Patreon style features to allow support for specific authors.

I would pay £5/month to the Guardian and be happy for them to take a 30% administrative cut if they ring fenced the rest for writers I want to support.

The Scott Trust has failed to preserve a newspaper that is fiercely independent. Only experimenting with democratisation of commissioning and hiring is going to break it out of the nepotist trap it has fallen into.

> The Scott Trust has failed to preserve a newspaper that is fiercely independent.

What makes you say that?

> The Scott Trust has failed to preserve a newspaper that is fiercely independent.

> nepotist trap it has fallen into.

Would you care to elaborate on these a little bit? I'm a long time supporter of Guardian and this is the first time I've seen a nepotism complaint.

I guess it's Alan Rusbridger employing his wife and daughter: http://www.anorak.co.uk/393065/reviews/nepotism-watch-the-gu...

Nice find, thank you. If this is true, the Guardian should definitely address it. I'll probably write to them myself after investigating a bit.

OT: Are you the same gadders who used to hang out on the Popbitch board?

Yes, but I left that life behind. You had the same username there?

Kind of. I'm not the 0898 from Popbitch. I just stole their handle on Hackernews.

What was your popbitch handle then?

I would agree with the concept of only supporting the writers that you like. I used to like the Guardian because they had good journalism. However, the opinion pieces are absolutely atrocious and detract the quality of the paper.

For example, there was an article in my google now articles recommended from the guardian that was "Milo Yiannopolous has huge support in Australia, men must call him out."

That opinion piece is titled "If Milo Yiannopoulos has huge support in Australia, men must call him out".

I wasn't aware of the article before your post, but now that I've read it, I don't see anything controversial (much less "atrocious") in it. Care to elaborate?

Some men feel weirdly threatened by the possibility of a world where their less than stellar behaviour towards women might be called out. Every comment like the one you're replying to is the same "I loved X until they lost all credibility and became biased by Y" where Y = calling out shitty MRA/Alt-right activist figures.

Nice try at attempting to slander my character or political stances: but no dice for you. This isn't about my own personal stances. It's about the publication and if you can call it news.

I'm really not sure where the MRA or comments on women came from in my original comment.

The Guardian (And the BBC) used to my main source for international news, and cultural trends until about 2012ish. That's when they started heavily featuring columnists that put out articles similar to the one that I mentioned. I wrote a letter to an editor with a concern, it got ignored. I stopped taking them seriously (as a whole) and reading as a primary source.

I don't get what you're saying at all . Publishing opinion pieces that advance a socio-economic agenda is one of the things I expect of a news paper.

If you don't agree with it you can disagree with it in the comments, write a letter to the editor, or stop reading.

But I like opinion pieces.

"This isn't about my own personal stances."

I'm not trying to 'slander' your character. Your complaint with the Guardian was literally about an article calling out Milo, a controversial bigot who, as was recently revealed by BuzzFeed, fraternises with Nazis for his own gain. This is a pattern I've seen recur among angry MRA/alt-right types - saying they got sick of news source because of something related to feminism.

If you're not MRA/alt-right then I'm sorry, but I'd suggest picking your examples more carefully.

I'm not sure why the editor owed you a reply either. You're free to not read it. It can't have meant that much to you as you didn't seem to fight it all that hard.

I'm no fan of Milo (kinda hate the guy honestly), but I'm not sure if "talking with sources about the topic of an article" really qualifies as fraternizing. That sort of thing is somewhat of a job requirement if you intend to write about the topic honestly. What's he supposed to do, not treat this like real journalism and just publish whatever negative quotes he can get from anyone about it?

Which specific nazis did Milo fraternise with? The Daily Stormer hates him, and he's married to a black man.

Or are you using 'fraternises' as 'contacted'? Milo is a journalist, they contact people. The Guardian also contacts nazis. It doesn't mean they are nazis.

What has become your primary source?

I'm not the person you replied to. I'm in no way threatened by my personal behavior being called out. I'm threatened because I'm lumped into the category of 'men' and then loaded with all the baggage of every man who I have zero connection with have done or said.

Don't get me wrong, I despise those shitty people too, but I also have a bone to pick with the people who are, successfully, generalizing the behavior to men.

No you're not, I explicitly said 'some'. I'm also a man. I abhor the shitty behaviour, but I recognise that our current conceptions of masculinity enable it - and trap us too. I've been through a few phases with my discovery and reconciliation with feminism, from ignorance, to ridicule, to acknowledgement and some very uncomfortable realisations about my own past behaviour, to now being full-on on board. Feminst arguments aren't just about women, they're about everyone living in a society where masculinity is just one of many forces, balanced with others. Parts of my life are now like this and it's awesome, and actually freeing from all the dullness of traditional masculinity and dominance.

Yes some said 'some' but the article refers to 'men' as a single, unthinking group. Men who refer to women this way are called misogynists and rightly so.

I'm not a fan of Milo either, but the article just reeks of slacktivism. It's just a angry rant that doesn't offer anything new.

It’s not weird that they feel threatened, they have a lot to gain from that behavior and some may be dependent on it. I think it’s normal to feel threatened by it given their potential lifestyle.

I just typed it directly from my phone. That must have been updated.

Haven't read the article, because I've seen numerous others from the news source. The issue I have with an article with a title like this: Why is it a bad thing to support Milo? Why is it "men who need to be called to fight"? (I don't care about reasons why you don't like Milo. I'm suggesting they're a person with different opinions, respect that)

TL;DR: It's been getting obnoxious that platforms have been used to push political stances. (Such as this) I see this as supressing the opposition and has caused a massive swing in action. (i.e. Trump is "magically" elected despite "predictions" saying otherwise, Brexit happens despite the upper class talking down and ignoring the larger population)

> Haven't read the article

Wow, so you are complaining about, and asking questions to the author of, an article based purely on your perception of its title?

> I don't care about reasons why you don't like Milo. I'm suggesting they're a person with different opinions, respect that

Just a cursory search into who Milo is, what he says and does will show you he is a deeply, virulently intolerant person. And in order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must be intolerant of intolerance [1].

> It's been getting obnoxious that platforms have been used to push political stances.

It's the personal opinion column of a journalist. I also don't see anything wrong with her "pushing political stances". Unbiased journalism is a myth. People who call for it are either looking for journalism they already agree with or stuff that is so mundanely unimportant that couldn't possibly contain any stance and therefore news value.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

> Wow, so you are complaining about, and asking questions to the author of, an article based purely on your perception of its title?

He's talking about The Guardian and how he doesn't read it anymore. He didn't attribute the author specifically. It doesn't matter whether it was the original author or Guardian's editors guilty of publishing the offensive content.

As I stated before: I don't care about why you don't like Milo.

What is important and what the news should be covering: Why are people taking a liking to him. (And do so in an impartial way without trying to fill the article with 80% hit-pieces) What is he saying and doing is catching a lot of attention? Why are his speeches resonating? How is he in existence? (Is his actions/his character in response to others)

> the society must be intolerant of intolerance

Intolerant towards intolerant extreme actions, yes. In an open society, you must be aware that people have different stances and prejudices. Closed societies can't tolerate the "intolerance". (I.e. Some countries you can't criticize the government)

> "pushing political stances"

Given this stance: I should be given the right to have my stances published in the paper. I operate the "Church of Not Wearing Pants" it is a religious organization, the article is about how the government should respect our religious existence by making pants illegal. Should that be published? It's as equally absurd as calling for a protest for someone you don't like.

> Unbiased journalism

I agree with you 100% neutral journalism doesn't happen. My problem is that unchecked journalism has given us an extreme selection of what is presented and the bias is injected into the news story from the author themselves.

> Why are people taking a liking to him. (And do so in an impartial way without trying to fill the article with 80% hit-pieces) What is he saying and doing is catching a lot of attention? Why are his speeches resonating? How is he in existence? (Is his actions/his character in response to others)

You mean exactly what they did [1] on many [2], many occasions?

> I operate the "Church of Not Wearing Pants" [...] should that be published? It's as equally absurd as calling for a protest for someone you don't like.

If the paper you send it to considers this newsworthy or something the public should consider, of course. If not, you have many other avenues available to you, including self publishing.

> My problem is that unchecked journalism has given us an extreme selection of what is presented and the bias is injected into the news story from the author themselves.

I'm not sure I understand what "unchecked journalism" is, but I don't see a problem here.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/nov/06/my-travels-i...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/13/donald-trump...

You don't seem to grasp the difference between news articles and opinion pieces. The latter is by definition subjective, and is featured to provide an outlet for subjective views, as opposed to the former that is supposed to at least strive to be neutral, objective, and fact-based.

The article you started your rant with is an opinion piece and is clearly marked as such. It is not a news story.

> platforms have been used to push political stances.

It's called a newspaper.

The British press have never had the American obsession with pretending to be impartial. This has its advantages and disadvantages, but one implication is that it's very clear which party and what politics is supported by which paper.

Is it really a thing with American newspapers though? Don't they often explicitly endorse political candidates?

French newspapers are more like what you describe, all the big ones pretend to be "neutral", whatever that means. Neutrality is a fool's errand IMO, people on your right are always going to say you're a leftist and vice-versa. I want my newspaper to be honest, that's the important part IMO.

It's an opinion column. It contains opinions. Why should we be tolerant of Milo's opinions, but intolerant of someone who says we should speak out against his opinions?

Complaining about newspaper opinion sections being a platform for pushing political views... that's what they're there for, and why they've existed for hundreds of years before now. You haven't even read the article, so you've obviously arrived with an axe to grind and are just trying to find something that fits.

> Brexit happens despite the upper class talking down and ignoring the larger population

Yeah, no. Brexit is very popular with the upper class. They're going to make a lot of money from it.

> Brexit happens despite the upper class talking down and ignoring the larger population)

The Brexiteers as the leading group like to style themselves (I prefer BeLeaver), are a bunch of the most priviledged upper class old boys of the most expensive schools in England. Boris the Clown went to Eton. Jacob Rees-Mogg got his nanny to deliver election leaflets...and also went to Eton. Farage himself is an ex stock-broker and also attended a top school. This arguement does not hold water

Yes, political movements tend to be headed by the wealthy and successful. I was a member a pro remain group where the same charge could be made.

The authors point is that Brexit was supported by working class non metropolitan people more than remain was.

[Citation needed]

For which point?

- For the first, Entrepreneurs In (my group) was obviously, well, entrepreneurs.

- For the second, everyone on both sides of the debate agrees that non-London folk won it for Brexit. You're literally the first person I've ever met that would dispute this.

I agree that non-London folk swung it. But it is a bit of a stretch to think either

a) that makes everyone outside London working class

b) that other cities didn't vote Leave

I see lots of landed gentry and farmers who were big on Leave (back then). Lots of Tory home counties types too. I don't think it is even slightly helpful to consider it a class issue.

a) It's generally agreed that folks in London, Brighton etc are more educated and wealthier than the rest of the country.

b) Yes, London and other big cities voted remain.

I don't think landed gentry make a huge portion of the population. Farmers are generally considered to be working class.

They later changed the headline to add "If".

Yep the URL and various metadata show the article without the 'if' added.

I too find some of the Guardian's columnists truly exasperating. However, isn't it important that they be given space to voice their opinions? Very occasionally, they give me pause for thought, and that's important. We've seen what happens (Trump, Brexit, etc.) when large sections of society retreat to personalised echo chambers.

Actually, that would be what happens when mainstream media becomes an echo chamber and is rejected by half the populace.

The Guardian is catering to its own specific echo chamber demographic and everyone else is retreating to theirs. My personal level of exasperation with the guardians CIF section got me to the point where I just stopped going to the site at all, it's now right up there with Facebook with me as a pointless waste of time and source of annoyance.

>We've seen what happens (Trump, Brexit, etc.) when large sections of society retreat to personalised echo chambers.

I can't tell if you're talking about pro-{Trump,Brexit} or anti-{Trump,Brexit} supporters. I think there was some significant part of Trump's moderate voterbase composed of people turned off by the purity tests of the progressives and echo chambers like those manifested in /r/politics.

Part of the issue of "echo chambers" is that they tend to be big fans of playing the fallacy of composition -- that is, they tend to take the "loudest extremists" on the other side, and over-promote them to marginalize the entire lot. Sure, radical progressives exist with narrow, dogmatic viewpoints... but these folks do not represent the entire spectrum of liberals / Democrats. The same goes for similarly narrow, dogmatic radical alt-righters or fundamentalists... these are not representative of all conservatives / Republicans. However, within echo chamber media, it is very common to see lots of unflattering reports on "radicals" of the "other side". These type of articles are actually pretty good warnings of what you are going to get.

As far as /r/politics/ and others of similar ilk goes, it seems to me that as a general rule, social media seems to be pretty good at carving out these "echo chambers" way more explicitly. It's probably because the promotional tools are crude (binary systems of likes / thumbs up / thumbs down / etc.)... and outrage-inducing headlines is much better at selling clicks. I personally don't think The Guardian is the greatest example of sober reporting in the world, but at this point I'd take them far and beyond any Reddit political sub I've seen so far, or in fact any mass political board on the Internet anywhere.

Pretty standard Guardian opinion piece, well in line with prevailing centre-left views, moderate feminists etc. No idea what is atrocious or poor quality about it

That isn't to say the Graun doesn't do things badly some time but this sort of article is precisely their raison d'etre

Ring fencing a percentage for specific authors sounds like a good idea but in practice you end up giving a portion of editorial control to wealthy donors. This is not good for any independent news media.

Theyre already doing that with the sponsored content section and some really worrying companies (eg Facebook).

Individual contributions towards specific causes could very easily be capped if they were worried about distortion.

In practice, as the UK Labour party has shown - create the right structures and you can drive out mega donors. The UK Labour party has gone from majority funded by millionaires to majority funded by small donors. The guardian could very easily take up the same democratic clarion call.

But they don't want to.

The Scott Trust was created to avoid the paying of inheritance tax.

> That certainly highlights the importance of the right UX, but I wish they had invested in Patreon style features to allow support for specific authors.

They undoubtedly keep track of which articles generate most clicks. Then again, clicks are a terrible metric.

Can't be happier with this! Proof that people are willing to pay for quality.

In The Netherlands we just got news that public service television etc sees an unexpected drop of income through ads (they're 60 mln euros short on budget in 2019). The quality of the online public news service is declining (clickbait titles for instance). Hopefully The Guardian sets an example!

Quality? If the Guardian is considered quality journalism, the others are probably not worth the paper they are not printed on.

Most links to the guardian I see are opinion pieces clearly made with a certain audience in mind. It is an echo chamber: people pay to read what they want to read.

Does quality journalism exist at all? The only exception seems to be technical subjects, like science and engineering. And that's because there is a huge amount of effort being made to avoid bias at every level. And even that tends to be thrown out of the window as soon as it hits a popular journal.

Where are the journals where fact are analyzed from several point of views. Take net neutrality for instance, where are the articles that really talks about the pros and cons? My opinion is that net neutrality is a good thing, I don't need a paper telling me what I am already convinced of. No, I want a paper to first explain me what net neutrality really is, and what are the drawbacks and how it compares to the positive aspects. It may not change my mind but at least I will be more informed.

I think that most media outlets make a wrong assumption about online content. They think that everybody wants content that's free above all else, so they swamp their content with ads.

But I think it's more that people want diversity. I'll happily support news outlets financially, but at $300/yr for Globe&Mail and $260/yr for NYTimes, etc, the cost is just ridiculous.

I WANT to support good journalism, but I want to pay a set price and have it be divided by my actual consumption. If I subscribe to two newspapers my consumption doesn't double, so I don't want to pay double.

The salable entity in the internet era shouldn't be a subscription to a newspaper, it should be an article.

For me it's the other way around. I pay for the Guardian because I think they do important, much needed journalism in many areas - including ones I'm not personally interested in. I like the idea that my money helps pay for articles that wouldn't get funded if it depended on a popularity contest.

For some publications I might agree. But many of them have comedy, sports and pop culture sections that I think blur their focus. I don't feel the need to spend a single dollar on supporting that content, I'll find better elsewhere if I want it.

You realise that one of the reasons for taking the observer was Clive James TV reviews like wise the Late Simon Hoggarts political diary in the Guardian.

> The salable entity in the internet era shouldn't be a subscription to a newspaper, it should be an article.

I think this is spot-on. My guess is that a browser based micropayment solution/ecosystem will emerge (a la Brave and its Basic Attention Token).

> My guess is that a browser based micropayment solution/ecosystem will emerge

I think so too, I think it's just a question of outlets realizing that the lost profits from cannibalizing their subscription sales does not compare to the income from allowing consumers to buy pieces of your publication.

It was tried in the past. There were attempts to get newspapers to unite behind single group subscription schemes. The newspapers themselves rejected it. Problem is if a third party collects your income for you, you're not really independent anymore. Also, they don't want to receive pennies because someone read a single article they wrote, they want long term subscribers. Finally it requires them to all adopt paywalls which they didn't want to do back then (maybe these days it'd be different).

I wish I could remember the name of the scheme I'm thinking of.

Project Alesia was the internal name.

Take a look at Blendle. It does exactly this - pay-per-article - and aggregates quite a few popular publications already.

Unlikely.

https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/4r683b/repudia...

https://archive.org/details/commercialismjou00holtuoft

I sometimes feel like there isn't much alternative to The Guardian - on the other hand the opinion pieces are often wearisome and at times the whole thing starts to feel like a parody of itself. It is as if, in becoming "worthy" of "support" it has to crank itself up to an insane degree...just as sugary drinks become more sugary over time to retain their core drinkers.

This is especially noticeable when ludicrous lifestyle pieces sit cheek-by-jowl with slightly overwrought culture wars content. I can't find an example today so I'll make one up:

- Is enjoying the movie Chinatown an act of molestation?

- Why Colombian hemp chocolate makes for the best edible luggage

I mean I both think Polanski should be in jail and that Colombia tourism should be encouraged...but this stuff isn't news.

What about the recent editorial condemning Taylor Swift: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/nov/24/the-gu...

See my problem here is not the analytical over-reach - it's an editorial that mentions Taylor Swift...

I think they explain why a high profile celebrity's position - or lack thereof - on modern day issues is a concern. They are arguing that not having a public position on issues means you are siding with the status quo and, since the status quo is Trump, they find it wrong for the "worlds biggest pop star" to take that stance.

> since the status quo is Trump

Why would a British newspaper think that?

It's an international newspaper, which has significantly invested in their US presence [1] in the past decade.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guardian_US

Not in print though, and the linked article is from the UK version, so statements about the status-quo in the UK edition are still relevant.

Unfortunately, the opinions of a sitting US president on any given issue has relevance not just for the US, but for the world as well. As long as that remains true, status-quo being Trump is a concern for everyone.

Yeah I get that. It’s not crazy. It’s just a world away from the kind of thing I can engage with. If that means I’m on my way out in terms of relevance I’d accept that. I’m not cross about it...I just can’t take it seriously.

Celebrity drama - political or otherwise - seems daft and boring to me as well, but I think people who think so are on their way out (in terms of age, if nothing else). So if the idea is to reach a younger audience in a language they'd understand / in a way they find appealing, I'm all for it.

> They are arguing that not having a public position on issues means you are siding with the status quo

No, they are assuming that everyone must have an opinion. It seems outside of their reality to accept that people don't care about the things they care about.

Just because I don't voice my opinion on which days I prefer the garbage collection truck to arrive doesn't mean I am a big fan of them arriving on Monday. I just have other things in life going on.

> Just because I don't voice my opinion on which days I prefer the garbage collection truck to arrive doesn't mean I am a big fan of them arriving on Monday.

Sure, you may not be a fan of it, but you don't find it a big enough problem to complain to the city.

For the editorial in question, the subject is Trump and their opinion is that finding Trump not big enough a problem to complain about is not an acceptable position for someone of such wide social reach. You may not agree with that assesment, but I think it's a fairly normal position for an editorial board to take.

Please link me to any other article from The Guardian complaining about one of the scores of other popular music artists who have also said nothing about Trump.

What they are doing is advancing the politicizing of everything and driving an agenda of divisiveness.

Why is an artist is not allowed to be an artist anymore but needs to be an political activist?

Even worse, because TS doesn't follow the Guardian's absurd logic, they are trying to shame her with their imaginative interpretation.

That's not journalism, that is a 6-year old's fantasy world, who dreams up stories about celebrities and why they are their imaginary friends/enemies.

But everything is already political? They're saying that _this_ specific person should have a more explicitly political stance, and not taking one is a political stance still.

58.9% of Americans voted last election. Has the Guardian already lost that much touch with reality to accept that those 41.1% of the population exist who don't care about their outrage theater?

America is not the world but that's not even the point. You're claiming they're politicizing the world. Election numbers don't represent willingness to make something political or whether it is. Not voting is a political decision.

I am only talking about the US situation here and treating the situation as if the Guardian were a US publication. That whole 'foreign media trying to meddle with US politics' narrative has reached an ironical meme status that is not worth arguing over any more.

"Everyone is jumping off cliffs therefore so should you"

This is nothing but grade-school peer pressure coming from adults and supposedly legitimate news organizations.

"The hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who in time of moral crisis preserve their neutrality."?

A 'moral crisis' for the Guardian's editorial board is not a moral crisis for a 20-something popstar.

Dante's Inferno is not actually a good source of morality.

You meant "moral panic" right?

"They're burning all the witches even if you aren't one..."

The status quo is actually hating on Trump and attempting to shove politics down every last crevice of the universe.

I think in fact The Guardian and most other "journalistic" outlets are a tad bit jealous of Taylor Swift, as she is one of the very few public people/entities these days who seems to be able to garner attention, and importantly rake it shit tons of money, without resorting to daily Trump outrage spam and culture war nonsense.

I guarantee you rags like The Guardian are shaking in their boots at the eventual prospect of Trump being out of office. They might want to take a lesson from Ms. Swift and learn to create actual quality content to prepare for that coming day of reckoning.

Its a stupid stance, and rather easy to refute. Good reasons for Taylor not to say anything: she doesn't want to.

Nobody complains about my stance of not talking about unicorns as being pro unicorn. Complaining about Taylor Swift not taking a stance on trump as being pro trump is a failure in logic at the most basic level.

How about we stop caring so much what celebrities think instead?

Wow, I haven't seen that before! Just stunning how distorted the Guardian's editorial board has become.

Their hatefulness must have become so deep seeded that they are unable to tolerate anyone out there who does not wanted to get instrumentalized by their 'either you are with us or you are our enemy' crusade.

I rarely read the opinion pieces... they seems to be deliberately designed to provoke a discussion. And occasionally, just plain clickbait.

But they are clearly labelled "Opinion" and then I don't have a problem ignoring and being very critical when I do happen to read such an article.

Notice also, no byline, and no comments allowed. The Guardian often panders to culture war outrage bait then hides behind taking responsibility or criticism with tricks like this, and the fact that an occasional decent article exists.

Why again does this failing rag deserve support, and why is this obvious propaganda upvoted to the top of HN?

Comments are only allowed on the blog-like "comment is free" posts, which presumably they don't consider editorials part of despite them now obviously being part of the same platform technically (hence the /commentisfree/ URLs).

This isn't something specific to this editorial; it is the general rule the website works by.

(As an aside, I'd much rather Comment is Free just died, because so much of what the Guardian gets lambasted over is content posted there—and its explicit point is less editorial control over the contents. If people don't want what gets posted with less direct editorial control over content, just don't give it to them.)

No idea what their arbitrary rules are, but I noticed a review by The Guardian of Swift's new album linked at the top of this article did have comments enabled. Both of these are obviously opinions, so I'm not sure what the difference is, besides the fact that one article (GP) was way more likely to receive backlash in the comments than the other.

Weird. It certainly used to be the case no "newspaper" article had comments enabled, but that definitely does. So yeah, OK, I don't understand when commenting is enabled any more.

I mean, at least the old "newspaper" platform v. "blog" platform distinction made sense—there were many more differences (editorial control being a major one) than just commenting.

For a while they had comments on almost everything, then they realised that the majority of comments were opposed to their viewpoint, and even ridiculed them. So they shut most of it down

That's not to say the readership wasn't with them - that's a lot harder to quantify - but thencommenters largely weren't.

Show me a comments section of an online newspaper that isn't full of bile and hate? It unfortunately seems unavoidable, and so many publications are just removing their comments sections. Much better than leaving the hate in, IMO.

It's the selective nature of their disabling of comments. Notice on this very article, at the top, is a link to a review by The Guardian of Swift's new album, and comments are enabled for it.

Both articles are obviously opinions, so why the difference? Only thing I can think of is one is more likely to see a backlash in the comments (because the article is ridiculous and deserves it) than the other.

They used to have comments enabled on most stories. I remember, from the time they were covering Snowden, all their stories seemed to have comments enabled.

I believe they largely shut down comments for a couple of reasons:

- Like a lot of newspapers, they feel very strongly that they have to moderate comments very aggressively. They didn't use automated systems to do that, because often the comments they wanted to delete were highly scored, so they ended up paying an army of moderators. That's not affordable for an organisation that loses tens of millions of pounds a year.

- As their columnists got crazier the comments got more vitriolic. It became commonplace for me to read a loopy story and go down to the comments to find people pointing out factual errors by the writers, or flaming them for their extreme opinions. I think the staff got tired of commenters trying to bring them back down to earth.

Nowadays they only rarely seem to enable comments. Presumably to keep mod costs down.

What utter rubbish. Just when you think it's already reached "Peak Guardian", they come out with that.

> I sometimes feel like there isn't much alternative to The Guardian

I stopped reading The Guardian years ago. A little part of me dies inside every time I see some piece of completely off-topic Guardian propaganda make the front page of Hacker News and nobody seems to care.

Some good examples collected here: https://www.thepoke.co.uk/2017/08/22/guardian-columns-look-l...

I pay them because it’s the only news source I actually trust.

Their live updating event pages are really great too.

They don’t always get it right with tech articles (they pissed off Pinboard a while back — they fixed it eventually) but still a great source of international news.

Their journalism generally is very good, certainly better than the majority of British newspapers and tabloids. Their opinion articles, however, range from decent to atrocious - I tend to ignore the 'Comment is Free' section now, unless I'm familiar with a piece's author.

Does members having a tracker free access ? Because it seems fair that if you pay you are not in the "if it's free you're the product" anymore.

It's important to move to this model.

Well, how do you get tracker free if you are already logged in. Tracking user action on its own is not a sin as business should know what customers are interested in. Selling the data to 3rd parties (and organizing the entire operation to support) is the dirty gray area.

Third party scripts is what everyone is talking about, yeah.

Good example: MetaFilter does not show Google Ads to logged-in members.

At least they promise an ad-free mobile experience. So there's a small chance they don't release the trackers on you.

https://membership.theguardian.com/eu/supporter?INTCMP=NGW_F...

If you want tracker-free, just install the relevant blockers; you shouldn't have to pay to have those removed if you don't want them, and likewise / on the other hand, the Guardian will want to gather usage statistics from unsubscribed and subscribed parties both.

So if you care about trackers, enable do-not-track and set up your tracker blocker.

It would be difficult to implement a membership model that doesn't have some tracking of whether you are a member or not. Exemption from third party trackers I totally agree with though.

I think that could be done with anonymous tokens, like PrivacyPass.

As much as I enjoy the quality of journalism from them, claims of The Guardian struggling, or being without sin (in the context of throwing stones around tax avoidance, especially post-Panama & Paradise papers, and at the risk of being labelled a whatbouter) should be considered in context.

That context is that they've got some pretty serious claims of tax avoidance in their not-too-distant past.

The Spectator ran a story [1] the middle of last year on the subject, though they've clearly got some fiscal & political views that could best be described as orthogonal to the Guardian.

The Independent ran their own story a few years earlier [2] that went into a bit more detail on the somewhat regrettable ratio of profits to domestic tax paid.

[1] https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2016/04/will-the-guardian-now-...

[2] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/guardian-med...

The Guardian responded to various such claims over the years in quite a bit of detail [1].

A choice quote:

> The Guardian's current position on tax is not immensely complicated, not least because it is not making any profits. When GMG makes taxable profits, it does of course pay full corporation tax. It is officially regarded by HMRC as "low risk".

> When we did our series on tax avoidance in 2008, we commissioned Richard Murphy, the scourge of tax dodgers the world over, to cast his eye over GMG's accounts.

> This is what he wrote:

> "Now let's be clear: what this shows is that on trading, the effective rate of tax was 46%. If goodwill were added back to profit the rate would be about 21%, a rate that is low largely because much of the profit came from the disposal of assets. If that were adjusted for then [year ended 30 March 2008], the rate would be above the statutory rate. There is nothing abnormal to comment on as a result.

> The low charge is on the exceptional part sale of the Auto Trader group. No complicated planning was needed to produce a low tax-charge: the government allows for tax to be deferred in this case if funds are reinvested.

> The Guardian did reinvest the funds. That's not artificial, offshore, or complex. Indeed, it is tax compliant: the company is doing what the government wants, and for which it provides a relief. So let's stop the nonsense about low tax rates now: it's just wrong."

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/help/insideguardian/2011/feb/22/...

Indeed, it's a tricky area.

With Panama / Paradise papers as well, most players are acting just within the letter of the law, though arguably not the intent, or at least the spirit, and outside observers (typically those without access to the expertise necessary to construct their financial affairs with such tax-minimising efficiency) are going to be frustrated by the brazen appearance of unfairness.

As I noted, Spectator and other publications are going to be strongly partisan around any review of the Guardian's affairs.

OTOH, articles published by the Guardian, about the Guardian, asserting the Guardian has done nothing wrong, are going to struggle to appear impartial.

I would be happy to support The Guardian etc. But this persona does not have credit/debit cards. So I have no way to pay them. I do support GnuPG and Riseup, however, because they accept Bitcoin.

I think that asking paywalled sites to support Bitcoin is a good way to stop them from posting provocative articles and could calm down the crazy speculative market.

I'd like Bitcoin to find its niche in payments for intellectual property.

The digital equivalent of a postal money order would be nice to have.

I have been on the Guardian support pages for at least a dozen times and I'd love to contribute but I don't find they make it easy.

There's a subscription for 14,99€/month (https://subscribe.theguardian.com/p/DBQ80F?edition=int) then there's the premium app which is also called subscription (https://www.theguardian.com/info/2013/aug/12/1) for 2,49 or so and then there's the Support thing (https://membership.theguardian.com/eu/supporter) for 4,99€/month. Some of these seem to include the other options...but I'm not sure. So I've just always given up. In addition Guardian Weekly doesn't seem to have a digital only version?

I've really tried. And I've also tried contacting their support but instead of answering my question they've canceled my subscription to Guardian Weekly. That was when I've just given up.

In the UK we are given the option for a one-off contribution. It's quite an oversight if they're not offering that outside of the UK.

https://support.theguardian.com/uk

It is important to remember that The Guardian is overtly and proudly a paper of the Left. I signed up and started paying in late November of 2016 only because Trump had won the Presidency. If Trump had not won the Presidency, I doubt I would have ever given my money to The Guardian.

It has been reported elsewhere that the ACLU and Planned Parenthood had very good years, in terms of fundraising. All of this is the anti-Trump effect. The success of The Guardian fits into that pattern.

Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo recently wrote about the crisis in online journalism and its ad-based model.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/theres-a-digital-media-c...

Basically, advertisers are asking/paying for more video content, but readers/viewers don't actually want it, which is a disaster waiting to happen.

Also, the market is flooded with VC-backed publications (Buzzfeed, Axios, ...) dumping free content on readers in an attempt to achieve scale, and those publications are also failing to hit their targets.

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/16/buzzfeed-ipo-stymied-as-reve...

It's hard to compete against free...

LOL @ the type of journalism The Guardian promotes... I'd rather burn money than support a publication that published articles to support my country's corrupt politicians. God forbid law enforcement investigate them. The Guardian always has their back.

What country is this?

I’m one of these new subscribers (from Viet Nam) that this campaign appeals to. The offer was too good to ignore ($1 for first 6 weeks, $4 each week after for the Guardian Weekly). There’s a bit of adjustment from my side because stories and writings in the print edition are different from my usually top-HN, popular-Twitter articles, but I’ve grown to it. Local expats in my place have no idea of this free int’l delivery, so for a long time they have been paying local importers/newstands a heft ton of money for these papers.

I'd gladly pay for a publication that wasn't cranking out clickbait, outrage pieces and catering to their advertisers and their need to be associated with only politically correct partners.

Similarly, I'd pay for a publication that brought me news I was interested in and covered both sides of every debate, instead of obviously catering to one side or the other constantly. They'd have to cover each side well, obviously.

This is the problem with modern media IMO, each side presents their own side to their viewers in a logical matter-of-fact way (almost dismissively, though, of finer details) but only picks the most egregiously bad logic / moral failings of the other side to show to their supporters. So each side thinks the other is crazy because they only see the ~1-5% of the other side that gets paraded around for their idiocy. Even which pieces each side chooses to cover are completely different: it's almost like they're not even reporting on events occurring simultaneously much of the time.

I only trust a very small number of publishers these days, such as the Atlantic and the Economist. Everything else is some sort of curated echo chamber

Agreed. It would be great if news pieces would constantly steel man "the other side" instead of constantly pushing their readers towards one of the extremes by confirming all of their already held stereotypes.

I think even The Economist can be one-sided. They don’t seem to be able to write about the leader of the Labour Party here without comparing him to Hugo Chavez. Not that I count myself pro-Corbyn, or even party-political. But it does seem one-sided in that respect at least.

relevant https://www.ted.com/talks/amanda_palmer_the_art_of_asking

I have a twisted idea to appeal to people's sense of charity:

Each person that subscribes, sponsors "no ads" visit for a random stranger. The cookie could last for a day.

That's just subscriber sharing links. Lots of papers do this. There's a bit of a 'free-trial' mixed in there but the important bit is giving subscribers the ability to share links guilt-free.

Thought I'd mention yours.org [1] which has multiple ways of monetizing content. With micropayments it's much more feasible to support this type of model. See their FAQ for more info [2].

[1] https://www.yours.org/

[2] https://www.yours.org/faq/

Part of getting people to pay you is - how easy it is to pay. One of the things I think are exciting is that projects like MetaMask basically integrate cryptocurrencies into your browser, making transaction very easy, safe (as safe as crypto at least) and anonymous, no matter if the entities participating in the transaction are in Yemen or London.

Asking members to support journalism, The Guardian - I'm sorry, is this a joke? Buzzfeed (yes, that Buzzfeed... well when they're not making one of their retarded videos and actually do some investigative journalism) has higher journalistic value than The Guardian.

Guardian is too opinionated to say that this is a good thing. Its contributors are more often "feeding their bubble" rather than supporting independent journalism. You can see that their quality has gone down rather than up during this time.

Will this be the future of online publishing? This is Medium's entire business model.

People within the "journalism" ecosystem can support itself with creative and different financial remedies. They strongly believe in their cause and benefit to humanity.

I would focus fundraising efforts to parties that economically rely on a free or paid press.

I've been told that the paper newspaper has better content than the website.

People always overplay the comment sections when they complain about the Guardian. In the physical paper comment makes up a handful of pages, but online because comment is free (to borrow a phrase) it can expand massively, and ad nauseam. They are silly, but the comment sections are also incidental to the rest of the newspaper.

I hope that being supported by subscriptions also means that they can dial back the sensationalism. I want to support papers which aren't screaming in my face all the time, and which support a better society.

One problem is that a big part of their ad revenue is going overseas.

The reason that most news sites can't run their own ads is that Google and co. are so incredibly good at tracking us, providing more value per ad.

I have reached the point where I think that if a respectable news organization went subscription-only (i.e. no ads, no clickbait, no free content at all), I'd jump on board. I want to be the customer.

The way I see it this model can only work for mediums with international readership. Say for example you have a newspaper in a small country with 10M people. Let's assume 5% of general population reads a newspaper and you have 5 major ones. That's roughly 100k readers per newspaper. Now how many of those could you convince to subscribe? Even if we assume an optimistic 10% that could hardly keep a newspaper afloat. You need readership in the millions to make this model viable, or a more loyal audience like the one Germans or Japanese have.

> You need readership in the millions to make this model viable

Not necessarily; for primarily online publications, operating costs rise roughly linearly with readership. I operate a donor-supported publication with a much smaller readership than the Guardian, yet we have stayed afloat for years via donations because our costs are much lower. It's a model that can work for practically any size of publication.

Your publication cost are roughly linear; your content creation costs are more or less constant with an increase in number of readers. I would assume that your content creation costs are vastly lower than the Guardian's which is why you can get away with fewer readers. You wouldn't be able to produce content like the Guardian on your budget, though.

Then why would ad-supported work instead, under the same readers?

If you can pay the bills with ads, but not your readers directly, you probably aren't providing enough value.

Funny enough, the linked site praises the Guardian's approach then hits me with a popup to subscribe to their newsletter...

Imagine if browser vendors added some form of online payment directly into the browser (like , i don't know , bitcoin).

Try to convince every website owner ever to accept the same payment methods.

Both Brave and Flattr are attempting the same, both have little to no success for that simple reason.

To be fair those are not major browsers. Firefox would be an obvious experimental vehicle, and the choice of bitcoin would be the least objectionable payment method (of the alternatives).

Really? You want your bitcoin wallet online?

You can have many Bitcoin wallets. And yes, at least one online, to pay stuff from. But you don't keep substantial balances in them.

Web Payments API is on the way.

I'd love to be able to microdonate to individual pieces of content on not just The Guardian but across the web.

have you seen Flattr? Sounds like exactly that

Anyone knwos about more successful examples of this business model?

The physcology behind this is more political than business, the guardian is a lefty newspaper and is getting political support

While this comment is down-voted, it is not necessarily wrong. As an Indian, I was so exasperated after Americans voted a criminal as the President that I subscribed to multiple organizations which are considered left-wing by American conservatives or libertarians. These include regular fees to NY Times, Propublica and Guardian with occasional donations to various organizations in the United States.

The danger is that "leftie" journalists hang out with leftie friends and they tell themselves "All my friends are voting Hillary/Remain, Trump/Brexit will lose". and then we lefties get shell-shocked the morning after.

At least these papers are intellectually honest and admit mistakes, one trait of the right-wing, and their press, is the metaphorical putting fingers in ears and going "La-la-lala!".

is the metaphorical putting fingers in ears and going "La-la-lala!".

Hardly - the NYT et al is yet to grasp the nettle and just admit that Hillary was a bad candidate. No Russians, no sexism, no conspiracies necessary.

NY Times is far from "considered left-wing". It's currently heavily criticized for publishing terrible articles sympathizing with and humanizing literal neo-nazis.

Well, neo-nazis are humans, and we should never forget that fact. They're not mindless monsters, they're actual living breathing people, and only by understanding that fact can we surmise their motivations and act against them.

> Well, neo-nazis are humans, and we should never forget that fact. They're not mindless monsters

I'm not sure that being mindful monsters is better.

Oh no, absolutely not.

Realizing that they're just people like you or me or anyone else is terrifying, because it means we all potentially have these impulses.

It makes it much harder to think of them as an "other", and just brush them away with "well, they're just evil monsters".

As someone pointed out, the coverage of neo-nazis was far more favourable and humanising than most of the coverage of black people wrongly shot by police. And surprisingly similar to a lot of the 1930s coverage of Hitler's charming dinner parties.

Fascism generally is charming until you're on the wrong end of the jackboot.

Where is this pointed out?

NYT and The Guardian are not "left-wing". They are establishment liberal and have supported every major war the US has been involved in. They regularly slander anti-establishment and left-wing intellectuals[1][2] and for the most part hate or ignore people like Corbyn and Sanders.

[1] https://theintercept.com/2016/12/29/the-guardians-summary-of...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/mar/23/noam-c...

The Guardian is 'centre-left' and the most left wing (it's the only one that is left of centre) broadsheet newspaper in the UK [0].

I don't think your comment about hating Corbyn is that correct either. There clearly were some negative articles about him and there was a columnist who was attacking Corbyn but who has since apologised [1].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_newspapers_in_the_Unit...

[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jun/10/jeremy...

I'm sorry, but that's total rubbish. The Guardian supported Corbyn in the recent general election [1].

The Guardian was very strongly opposed to e.g. the invasion of Iraq (articles too numerous to cite).

Of your two references, one is from Glenn Greenwald criticising the Guardian. The other is Glenn Greenwald /published in the Guardian/ defending Chomsky. The article he criticises got corrected.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/ng-interactive/201...

> I was so exasperated after Americans voted a criminal as the President

The other candidate was Hillary, so the Americans had no choice in voting for a criminal.

Don't know why this got downvoted, it's the same as dailymail or the sun, or times, they have right wing donors and subscribers

Just they often happen to be a few billionaires that use the media platforms to push their agendas to get beefy returns.

I'm not saying all, but as a general trend.

There isn't a single left-winger I know who thinks the Guardian isn't mostly garbage. They are filled with Blairites, have long hated Corbyn, barely covered Sanders in their US edition and openly libel even moderately left-wing intellectuals before they are forced to retract their articles after their egregious reporting is pointed out.(eg: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/mar/23/noam-c... and https://www.theguardian.com/media/2005/nov/17/pressandpublis...)

The Guardian is for the most part the paper of liberals and Hillary Clinton fans.

I rolled my eyes so hard at this misrepresentation that I think I injured myself.

Your point is not well-made. The Guardian is a soft-left newspaper, objectively so, and while it might not be a flag-waving neo-Pravda it’s anything but a paper for classical liberals.

It's not about being "flag waving neo-pravdas" - incidentally their example of egregious reporting that I gave an example of, was aimed at someone who's compared the soviet union to fascist states and was fiercely critical of Lenin, Trotsky and Marx.

It's about their documented antipathy against anyone left of Blair and New Labour. Call a Bush-allied war-mongering neoliberal "soft-left" if you want, but it's risible to claim that the grassroots organising and activism that Momentum and Sanders represent is Stalinist.

You're making an unsupported assertion that people pay for leftist writing rather than for quality writing.

Please supply arguments to support that.

Assuming "quality" means accuracy/truthfulness, how can the average reader rate the quality of any writing?

That's a strange question. Do you perhaps mean: as opposed by judging by proxies like nuance, complicated sentences, absence of sensationalism, etc?

Hindsight is one way. A reader looking for quality publications can wait a month, reconsider and form a conclusion.

Yes. But what conclusion can time bring? What independent conclusion can be better formed at a later date?

(This feels weird.)

Newspapers often print news. Things not yet confirmed or denied elsewhere. Today I see a headline about which ministers knew about a particular evil deed before it was too late. Right now the article rests on anonymous sources, in a week all of of the relevant people will have spoken on the record.

The fairness of a summary or clarity of an interpretation is similarly easier to judge after the people involved have had the opportunity to react to the article.

I thought the begging letter was shown just because I had an ad blocker on. The site works well for the ad blocking crowd, maybe they make it so deliberately, so at least they can send you the begging message.

> begging letter

> begging message

I keep seeing this in many online spaces and for the life of me, I just can't understand how asking for money in exchange for value (journalism in this case) is considered begging.

Seriously, this [1] is their ask, can you (or anyone else) show me exactly which part of it is begging?

[1] http://www.niemanlab.org/images/guardian-membership-ask.jpg

It's not so much the message as its persistence, timing and size. It shows up every time and takes up half the screen. It would also be nice if the reader was given some time to read actual content before being blasted with the message again. Feels like one of those many many sites that immediately ask you to fill out a feedback form before you've even browsed anything. If it's not a beg, it's most certainly a nag.

> its persistence, timing and size.

> It would also be nice if the reader was given some time to read actual content before being blasted with the message again.

What do you mean ? It's an inline box that always appears after the article. It's not a popup, it doesn't hinder navigation, it doesn't even have position:fixed so you can just scroll by it if you want. I don't think they could be nicer about it if they tried.

You're mistaken. There are two separate messages - a popover that appears at the bottom of the screen every time you browse a page (whether it be the front page, an article, etc.) AND the more innocuous inline text at the end of every article that you mention.

Ah, sorry. I never saw such a popover. Probably due to adblock.

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