The Guardian flourishes without a paywall
493 comments
·March 29, 2025yen223
I was hoping this article went deeper into the Guardian's somewhat unusual ownership model, because I find it interesting and would love to learn more.
The Guardian is owned by (and I think largely funded by?) a trust that was intentionally set up in a way to ensure no commercial interest could interfere with the paper. How well it achieved that goal is, of course, debatable, but it has survived nearly a century in that form.
sambeau
mushufasa
Here's how this happened as I understand it.
The original founder of the guardian, Taylor, ran it like a business. While today journalism struggles to make money, in the 1800s news was lucrative.
In his will, Taylor carved out a sweetheart deal (right of first refusal) to sell the paper to CP Scott, a progressive Liberal politician, and also his nephew.
After running the paper for many years, CP Scott's will named his two sons to inherit. Both of whom worked as editors on the daily.
In a freak turn of events, both CP Scott and one of the sons died within a few months. The remaining son was concerned about paying double for the hefty inheritance tax at the time ("death tax").
The death tax could be so large as to force a sale of the paper, to create liquidity to cover the tax. I guess it was a tax on unrealized gains!
The remaining son, John, cleverly found a workaround to avoid the silly death tax: by renouncing his ownership and transferring the business to a Trust. Since he worked at the paper as editor, giving up ownership was a clever tradoff that actually gave him de facto tenure as editor, by making his day job more stable.
This is all to say: the guardian became a nonprofit-like trust at a point in time it was already a stable business, with capital to self-finance.
This was not a case of a independently wealthy businessman creating a foundation to create a paper from scratch (like many created universities).
The Scott trust was created by journalists for journalists, at a unique point in time where journalists had money to self-finance. Motivated not by some idealistic vision but by a more practical desire to avoid a hefty tax on unrealized gains.
InsideOutSanta
>found a workaround to avoid the silly death tax
I don't know if you're using the word "silly" sarcastically here, but if not, isn't this an example of this type of tax working exactly as intended? John still greatly benefited from his parents' work, and so did society at large to this very day.
lifeisstillgood
>>> The Scott trust was created by journalists for journalists, at a unique point in time where journalists had money to self-finance
Where is the trust created by coders for coders at a time uniquely profitable for coders?
euroderf
A death tax is a tax on death. It's not that. It's a birth windfall wealth tax.
rzwitserloot
"Death Tax"? What the heck are you on about? The dead aren't taxed, they can't, they are dead. What are you going to do to them as punishment if they fail to comply? Shoot the corpse?
It's a tax levied on those who get a completely free/undeserved sudden windfall; in the sense that they did not do anything to obtain it and didn't even have to expose risk or pay for a chance.
Most nations put pretty serious taxes on earnings from lotteries, and an inheritance is like a lottery where you didn't even have to pay for a ticket.
There's no obvious objective truth about the idea of taxing inheritance. But calling it "silly death tax" is, oof. Idiotic. Cut it out.
tempfile
> I guess it was a tax on unrealized gains!
Inheritance taxes invariably are. The recent UK controversy around farm land inheritance was the same.
timewizard
> While today journalism struggles to make money
It rather depends on what you mean by journalism. I suspect your definition is true to the Guardian's apparent aims, publishing well researched truths to an interested population. What was being published in the 1800s was most certainly not that; instead, being very similar to the current forms of "opinion journalism" that are exceptionally lucrative today.
pyrale
> This is all to say: the guardian became a nonprofit-like trust at a point in time it was already a stable business, with capital to self-finance.
The same kind of logic was applied to two french newspapers:
- Le canard enchaîné, created in 1915, specific status preventing sale of capital made in 1958. Motive was foiling an attempted takeover by another company.
- Mediapart, created in 2004, trust made in 2019. They made the change deliberately in order to protect the newspaper's future.
Both newspapers are doing well today, so I'm not sure this kind of thing is a product of its time and impossible to copy nowadays. However, both newspapers are producing quality investigative journalism, which most news media don't these days.
akoboldfrying
Fascinating!
(I do find some irony in the fact that a majority of Guardian readers these days would abhor attempts by rich businessmen to dodge taxes.)
xenophon
For more on how this model might have changed journalism for the better, this is a great old article from the former CIO of the Yale Endowment: https://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/28/opinion/28swensen.html
johnea
And of course, there's always wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Trust_Limited
Bozo could easily establish a similar trust to support the Wash Post in perpetuity. But clearly he has other motives.
gadders
Yes, partially created to save taxes or a forced sale.
s_dev
This is the same as the Irish Times:
rsynnott
Yup; it's a different legal structure (the IT one is a CLG), but same intent. I think there are a few other similar things around.
fergie
The Guardian is fairly protected from commercial influence but its not that well protected against elitism, which unfortunately still means a lot in the UK today.
This is why the Guardian is simultaneously "progressive", yet also at times openly hostile to the working class. Its "progressive but not working class" stance promotes identity politics, and probably does more to pit left-wing voters against each other than any other UK-publication.
That said, I am a subscribe to the Guardian Weekly which I supplement with the Spectator, a traditionally conservative publication, in order to get a decent balance of UK news.
veunes
The Scott Trust model is fascinating and doesn't get nearly enough attention, especially given how rare that kind of structure is in modern media
croisillon
I never really looked into the details but i believe Le Monde Diplomatique is built a similar way with their foundation Les Amis du Monde Diplomatique
scarab92
I’m not sure that it’s ownership is the reason for The Guardians success. NYT has also been successful with a more traditional ownership model.
Their success, I suspect, is due to being early to shift from addressing a particular geographic market, to addressing an ideological market, after the internet destroyed the geographical barriers to entry.
I suspect this internet driven incentive to focus on ideological markets is a big part of why politics in most countries has become so partisan. When newspapers focused on a particular geography, but had limited completion, they had an incentive to avoid becoming partisan because that would only serve to limit their addressable market.
lordnacho
I think a big part of it is that the internet made the existing leaders into massive winners, a bit like how the teams at the top if the first division managed to cement themselves in the premiership when that happened.
If you were to name some important newspapers in 1995, you'd probably also have the Guardian, NYT, WaPo, on your list. They just pulled away from the pack due to the was reputation works in the internet age.
PaulDavisThe1st
And yet the LA Times and the (London) Times and the Chicago Tribune did not, so however true this is, it took some extra magic sauce to "pull away from the pack". It wasn't just "being an important newspaper in 1995".
harvey9
The guardian always addressed a left of centre audience even before the internet. The Telegraph a right of centre one. The print advert market used to sustain that.
pjc50
UK press has basically always been partisan, which was why the Daily Mail was publishing pro-Hitler articles on behalf of its owner.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Harmsworth,_1st_Viscoun...
damagednoob
Or The Guardian supporting the Confederacy[1].
yeahitsgreat12
Yeah right. And pigs just flew past my window. Because billionaires definitely don't pre-hide their fingerprints in some shady 'independent trust' while we all pretend the article just wrote itself out of the goodness of corporate hearts.
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Stratoscope
I love The Guardian! It is one of my two ongoing donations, along with the Internet Archive.
Back when it was The Manchester Guardian, they produced one of the most remarkable TV commercials in history, "Points of View":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SsccRkLLzU
I first saw this commercial when Will Hearst (yes, of that Hearst family) screened it at a Software Development Forum meeting in the late 1980s.
I wish this were a better transfer, but it is what we have. Does anyone have a link to a higher resolution transfer?
smcl
It is one of the better UK papers but the bar there is extremely low. They're often still painfully "both sides" on things, they're slow on the uptake and they're often quite credulous. Wonderful example that I had scrolled past shortly before I switched tabs and read your comment: https://x.com/Obseyxx/status/1906396387031368067
As I said, they're the best of a bad bunch but that's damning with faint praise.
PickledChris
They've gone downhill in the last few years in my opinion, they've become more overtly partisan and got substantially downgraded on factual reporting by MediaBias Fact check: https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/the-guardian/
They've always been left of centre, but they're lazy and jump more into the predictable culture war pandering.
The FT is streets ahead of anyone else, they've become more centrist and less dry in recent years. I don't know what their revenues are like but I'd wager that they're doing better as they're one of the only ones with a business model that allows them to pay for good journalism.
smcl
If they were "left of centre" that would be fine there are few if any major left-wing newspapers in the UK. The pandering from my perspective has been to those on the right. They seem to be doing the "well if both sides hate us we must be doing something correctly!" except the right want rivers of blood and the left want public transport, healthcare and to ensure the more vulnerable among us are treated with dignity and compassion.
The "culture war" people refer to is not "woke ideology" being pushed everywhere as is so often the accusation, but an enormous, orchestrated push against an otherwise fairly organic process where the world had otherwise become more naturally more accepting of immigrants and LGBTQ+ minorities.
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klelatti
Not from before 1959 when the paper was renamed. 'The Guardian' name actually appears in the ad.
atoav
Simple but effective, I like it. Journalism in the best form is exactly this: trying to give you the whole picture with all the context you need to contextualize the information.
Sadly a lot of what calls itself jouranlism today is the exact opposite: Not showing the whole picture, serving prexisting world views, overly emotional and out to entertain.
hk__2
> Sadly a lot of what calls itself jouranlism today is the exact opposite
I don’t think this is something new, I feel that most of "journalism" has always been like this with few medias making the effort to show the whole picture.
rao-v
The Guardian feels like the last good normal newspaper at this point. Great book and movie reviews, normal detailed circa 2005 coverage, and none of the NYT’s wierd if we didn’t break the story we won’t talk about it.
euroderf
Yes the Guardian hits all the bases, and without sounding too self-satisfied about it.
lordnacho
Good sports coverage as well.
timeon
> the last good normal newspaper at this point
I guess "in English" was implied.
antasvara
>The Guardian US expects to hit $44 million in voluntary reader donations in the U.S. and Canada this year, up 33 percent over last year
>"We’re now at a place where our audience is actually bigger in the U.S. than The Wall Street Journal’s audience in the U.S."
That feels like not that much money considering the readership, right? The WSJ has somewhere around 3 million subscribers; they would need to be making only 14 dollars per subscription per year to do that sort of revenue.
Not to say that's necessarily a bad thing, but more that you need a pretty substantial readership to get there.
Put another way, that revenue is like 200k subscribers at 20 bucks a month. That would put you at the level of a newspaper like the Minnesota Star Tribune as far as subscription revenue.
PopAlongKid
>that revenue is like 200k subscribers at 20 bucks a month
I suspect donors (as opposed to subscribers) pay much less than $240/year.
antasvara
That's my point. This is a website with readership comparable to the WSJ that is pulling in reader revenue closer to the Minnesota Star Tribune.
It's just something that I feel should be in the conversation. The Guardian's business model is clearly successful for them, but IMO it's not something that can apply to most other newspapers.
Based on my napkin math for the WSJ compared to the Guardian, the WSJ would only expect to get ~5% of their revenue replaced if they switched business models. Even if I'm off by a factor of 5, you'd still be looking at a 75% reduction.
I don't say this to be critical of the Guardian. I love their work and I'm happy they've chosen the model they have, because it enables access to high-quality journalism for free. It is also a great case study proving that this business model works and can be sustainable. But I don't want people drawing the conclusion that every newspaper could survive like this.
puttycat
The Guardian is simply a truly great paper with excellent writers. Maybe that's their secret?
lores
I'm surprised at all the love for the Guardian... It's better than nearly all the rest, sure, but it's still often outrage-bait or inaccurate information. Media bias / Fact check give them a rating of 'Mixed' on accuracy: https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/the-guardian/
I had a free subscription to the Financial Times through a weird cookie misshap, and I was impressed by the quality of the reporting and the fact they were happy to shoot down corporations behaving unethically, which I hadn't a priori expected.
justincormack
The FT is definitely the best UK paper. Expensive.
thinkingemote
Lindsay Anderson the left wing film maker always read the telegraph to be able to see the lies more clearly. A centrist these days might want to read both that and the guardian to steer a true course!
permo-w
that is my method, but I have to remind myself that the telegraph is evil every time I open it because otherwise it can start to get to you
briandear
It’s “great” if you believe in their ideology.
tmnvix
Watching them throw Sanders and then Corbyn under the bus was a wake up call for me. It's not the leftist paper it makes out to be, but strongly establishment.
griffzhowl
Yes, and they threw Assange under the bus too, after being one of the papers working with Wikileaks on the original cablegate revelations. It was one of their own journalists, Luke Harding, that originally exposed the unredacted cables from Afghanistan and Iraq by publishing the password to the encrypted file containing them as a chapter heading of a book he wrote on the episode. That's what forced Assange to publish the unredacted cables in the first place, so that the informants mentioned in there would know what information about them was insecure. (Apparently the file had been shared around a bit, but the information was secure as long as the password wasn't public)
The Guardian (and Luke Harding especially) have never really come clean about this, which is grating since publishing the unredacted cables is the ostensible reason for Assange's decade-long persecution and imprisonment, and the Guardian essentially followed the establishment line over this period, arguably then being complicit in the persecution of Assange for something which Harding was really responsible for.
Of course, the primary reason for Assange's persecution wasn't the release of the material per se, but to discourage him and others from further exposing govt crimes.
pmyteh
The Scott Trust established its editorial line as "liberal" (in the UK, not the US sense) and it's generally hewed to that. Despite occasional flashes of appearing radical it's an establishment, social liberal paper that believes in slow reform.
I also wish it were more of a leftist paper but it is what it is.
UncleSlacky
It's also pretty much a safe space for TERFs too.
permo-w
I don't disagree, but I will point out that Sanders writes for them occasionally
scheeseman486
Conservative leaning newspapers weren't always total dogshit and good reporting is good reporting, regardless of ideology. This is a belief that you don't seem to share, given you make out ideology to be the problem as opposed to the quality of the journalism itself. Very shallow thinking and it's a perfect exemplification of poor media literacy.
DeathArrow
Good reporting is not skewed by ideology.
Good reporting is presenting facts about all sides.
Good reporting is not about demonizing your perceived enemies while excessively praising your idols.
concordDance
I'd put the Telegraph as the right wing equivalent of the Guardian. Biased in the opposite direction but relatively reliable too.
DidYaWipe
You neglected to state what their "ideology" is.
IshKebab
It's a fairly left wing paper, but not crazy-left. Very middle class. "Guardian reader" is pretty much a social class. They even had a dating service for a long time!
I'm not criticising; I think they're a little too indignant at times - woke even - but overall they're probably the least objectionable newspaper in the UK, maybe the world.
Kind of like the left wing mirror of The Times.
concordDance
I wouldn't call the writers excellent. The guardian is famous for its typos.
(Separately the writing style is mostly not to my taste, but that's subjective)
DrBazza
It’s not called the Grauaniad for nothing. Private Eye have mocked it for years.
chgs
Private eye, who famously backed Wakefield and led to thousands being unvaccinated.
Still haven’t seen an apology. Maybe they like rfk.
rsynnott
That’s a failure of editing, not writing. Though it’s mostly a historic thing in any case; its heyday was about a century ago.
arp242
Meh; it's mostly little more than a meme. And also something from the age of printed papers and typesetting errors.
rozab
The other day they forced me to give full consent to all advertising cookies in order to read without a subscription. I found this surprising, I do read them a great deal, it might only happen for heavy users.
wkat4242
Yeah weird, it's never done that to me. I'm in the EU though. Maybe that is a difference.
KomoD
Nope, I'm in the EU and I've gotten it.
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6LLvveMx2koXfwn
NoScript resolved this issue for me.
robocat
I haven't seen that - but I recently saw them do a self-advertising segment before one of their videos on their site.
sega_sai
Yes, I had the same. After that I decided to put them in separate firefox container.
Nursie
Apparently the ICO in the UK has decided that "consent or pay" can be compliant with the UK GDPR, the post-brexit version of the GDPR that's in UK law.
It feels wrong to me, but there we are.
Personally I use an ad-blocker, but I also subscribe for a few bucks a month.
pests
I have no issue with "consent or pay".
They have to pay the bills somehow. The alternative to "consent or pay" is "pay". I'm really struggling to see how you feel its wrong.
I am actually having difficulty writing this, as "consent to share your data" is ultimately a way to track and collect data on you. But what can you do? They are offering you something which takes time and money to produce. You can pay for it with money or with your data.
Isn't this choice better than companies just always tracking you, and also trying to get you to buy something?
Deep down I know most people don't understand the amount of data and other information companies collect on them nor what they do with it. But at a certain point we have autonomy. I'd rather be given a choice between "we track all your data" or you can pay verses the default of tracking all data and paying. There is always the third option of not consuming the content. The choices we make.
jampekka
> They have to pay the bills somehow. The alternative to "consent or pay" is "pay".
There was plenty of ad funded media before tracking.
Nursie
> I'm really struggling to see how you feel its wrong.
https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/uk-gdpr-guidance-and-re...
On the same page that the ICO gives guidance that "consent or pay" is legal, "take it or leave it", in which you are invited to pay with your data or go elsewhere, is not.
This seems very weird to me. Either data is a form of payment or it isn't, and I had laboured under the (mis?)apprehension that the GDPR removed it from this sort of situation - that one had a right to say "no" to invasive tracking and that shouldn't affect the service provided one way or another. This muddies the water over true consent to track and it seems the ICO agrees -
"When the only alternative to consent is paying a single price which combines access to the core product with a fee for avoiding sharing personal data for the purposes of personalised advertising, it can be difficult to demonstrate freely given consent."
> They are offering you something which takes time and money to produce. You can pay for it with money or with your data.
In this case I do pay for it with money
> I'd rather be given a choice between "we track all your data" or you can pay verses the default of tracking all data and paying.
Personally I'd rather government legislate away the tracking unless it can be genuinely demonstrated that someone opted in, with no form of coercion at all, and those who wanted to be paid to host advertising switch to a more context-sensitive rather than audience-sensitive model. And I had thought that was where we were going. This feels a bit like backsliding on that.
(I'm not going to argue this is black and white "OMG so wrong!", I can definitely see there's room for differing opinions here, and I am aware I carry an anti-advertising, anti-tracking bias.)
brnt
> I have no issue with "consent or pay".
I have an issue with control over my browser. If you are sending me bytes, I am and should be free to render it as I see fit. If you send me bytes containing your product, you should understand this. If you want me to pay for your product, then place it behind an actual paywall. Don't offer the product together with some instructions that show commercials. I won't look at them, and no reasonable argument will make me.
I have no issue with paywalls and paying. I have an issue with attempting to control how I render what your webserver sends me.
rwmj
Yeah that's what the ICO thinks and it's clearly wrong, since you don't consent if the alternative is paying.
reidrac
I've seen it in some Spanish newspapers and those are subject to the regular GDPR.
You get tracked when you subcribe as well. The Guardian is far from perfect, and that bothers me more when I'm paying a subscription.
Nursie
Fair enough - I don't think the laws have diverged much in this area in the last several years, and while there was always a difference in national legislation and how the actual enforcement bodies would act, there's generally more commonality than difference.
And yes, that sucks. I object very much to the "you subscribe and we still track/advertise" model, just as I object to ads creeping into paid tv streaming services now. And yes, I would expect the guardian to hold itself to a higher standard :/
klelatti
It's interesting that The Guardian's name itself reflects one of the UK's enduring problems: the extreme dominance of the South East and London in particular.
Originally founded, written, published and printed in Manchester and bearing the name 'The Manchester Guardian' it's now abandoned all of these in favour of London with just a handful of Manchester based journalists.
The contrast with the US and Germany say is stark.
Emma_Goldman
As a long-standing Guardian reader, I couldn't disagree more. It might be financially solvent, but the business model of the paper under the leadership of Katherine Viner has shifted to high throughput, low quality content vying for clicks in the attention economy. They have gone all-in on volume.
Compare that to the Financial Times, which has a low throughput of very high quality content, enabled by a discerning and high paying subscriber base. I read the Guardian for the lifestyle / cooking sections these days, but the FT is an incomparably better and more serious publication, whatever your politics (mine are the diametric opposite of the financial class).
disgruntledphd2
Yeah, me too. I'm definitely more on the side of the Guardian politics wise, but the FT is SO MUCH BETTER.
To be fair though, the FT is both really expensive, sells market data for a large price, and has a tier of subscription that can only be bought by organisations (they didn't even show me a price).
The Guardian has been going downhill massively over the last few years. I think the point at which I lost faith in them was when they trumpeted that 50% of carbon emissions were caused by 10 companies (i.e. the oil majors).
Emma_Goldman
They approach environmental reporting like a campaign organisation, it's just not serious. Politically, I will never forgive the Guardian for the mendacious editorial campaign they waged against the Corbyn project. In general, the Guardian leads with cultural issues geared towards the liberal professional managerial class, which only compounds the logic and superficiality of its clickbait business model. It is incredibly hard to learn anything by reading the Guardian. This quote from the nymag piece is telling: “The reason I think that it works for us is we cover so much breaking news and it drives a lot of traffic, and we have the scale to make it work,” Reed said. “Even if we only monetize one percent, it’s still a lot.”
disgruntledphd2
> Politically, I will never forgive the Guardian for the mendacious editorial campaign they waged against the Corbyn project.
Yup. As Harold Wilson is reputed to have said, with friends like the guardian who needs enemies?
ziofill
If you are on iOS you can also use the app via TestFlight (in beta). It's free of banners and you get to contribute to its development if you spot a bug.
mmooss
Their focus on their mission of informing the public, not just a few, is impressive and heartening:
> "... there is a real crisis of access to reliable information for people who don’t want or have the means to subscribe to the New York Times. That is a real problem that we have an answer to.”
veunes
It's a bit of a unicorn model - you need massive scale, a global brand, and a steady stream of high-stakes stories to make reader donations work at this level. Smaller outlets probably can't replicate this
mentalgear
True, yet above all: integer instigative journalism.
https://archive.ph/xBA7x