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Comment by drinchev | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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...

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

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

Not since April of this year.

> 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/

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.

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