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Comment by tsmarsh | Hacker News Reader

The Guardian is not designed to make money. It has a budget, but that budget is defined by what it wants to achieve editorially, and that is only loosely to sell more papers. Ultimately it is designed to be "the worlds leading, liberal voice" and most editorial decisions are made with that in mind. The money comes from a trust which is managed by the parent company.

That is not to say that it wouldn't like to make a profit. But it doesn't 'need to' to survive as its money is generated by its parent company Guardian News & Media which is then plowed back in the paper and the trust. GNM does very nicely. Until relatively recently it owned the UK arm of AutoTrader. It also owns a lot of local talk radio stations and newspapers which turn a tidy profit. The irony is that many of these sources are more closely aligned politically to the Daily Mail that the Guardian.

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How is it really ironic?

The Guardian is extremely sociliast in its reporting. That's just not popular. You're not going to make any profit with that political viewpoint. (Although you'll certainly be popular on Reddit, the BBC, and other left leaning communities).

To make money, you need to be center / center right to appeal to most people. That's why newspapers like "The Sun" and "Daily Mail" absolutely dwarf "The Gruaniad" in readership.

If anything, to me it smacks of hypocracy rather than irony. It would be like a campaign setup to promote vegetarianism, bankrolled by a side venture selling beef burgers.

Socialist only by American standards (and, possibly, by the standards of certain Tories who still think of the US as a former British colony). By European standards, the Guardian is a fairly typical center-left newspaper. If you want to look at an actual socialist newspaper in the UK, try the Morning Star [1].

The relative popularity of the Sun and the Daily Mail is best explained by Jim Hacker and friends: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGscoaUWW2M&t=1m0s

In other words, a classical broadsheet vs. tabloid situation. Politics doesn't sell as well as gossip and T&A.

[1] http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/

Ach, come on, the Guardian's incredibly left-wing. Or at least was until recently (less than 5 years).

When I used to buy papers a few times a week, I rotated the Guardian, The Independent and the Telegraph.

If you went outside the news articles the Guardian was foaming at its mouth, agenda crazy leftie. The editors, opinions and letters pages were filled with rubbish. Far more than the Telegraph was politely right wing.

Perhaps they've toned it down since focusing online, but though I don't read the site I still come across op pieces linked in various places that show otherwise.

The Guardian is a broadsheet, not a tabloid. If you want compare it something on the right use the Times or the Telegraph.

The tabloid equivalent of a left newspaper (though the terms make much less sense since the tabloids aren't nearly as political) would be the Daily Mirror, and it more than holds its own in the circulation wars.

They're not exactly socialist, they're centre left. They just look socialist in comparison to stuff like the Telegraph.

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