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Guardian records first operating profit since 1998
- ChrisSD 8y agoThe Guardian editor-in-chief on breaking even against the odds: https://www.theguardian.com/global/2019/may/01/the-guardian-break-even-katharine-viner https://www.theguardian.com/global/2019/may/01/the-guardian-...
- growlist 8y agoWhilst there have always been loony left, misandrist etc. articles in the Guardian (I speak having read it regularly since the 80s) I'd argue that to make their supporter model work they've had to drop their editorial standards lower still.
- vfclists 8y agoHave any of the major media outlets exhibited anything remotely resembling editorial standards "that they could drop lower still"? For give me if I sound cynical but I am totally done with these Brexit hating pro uncontrolled immigration rags. Advice to news outlets. If you want to make profit than see your readers donate their hard-earned wonga to Tommy Robinson, Carl Benjamin et al you'd better get a grip on reality.
- DanBC 8y agoWe've just had local elections where the resutl was a swing away from Brexit supporting parties towards Brexit opposing parties.
- Veen 8y agoThat's a somewhat tendentious analysis. The Tories certainly got a spanking, but UKIP stood in fewer areas than in the previous election and the Brexit Party didn't stand at all. I suspect we'll see a truer picture in the European elections.
- ptah 8y agoLib Dem and Green Party, that are Remain/People's vote Parties have made huge gains though
- Zenst 8y agoBut then the Lib Dems took a beating last time these elections came to pass and whatever happened, they were going to get more seats on the rebound. Sure they gained more but even if you total all the Green and Lib Dem votes - it would still be less than 50% of the votes from these elections. But the Green party have IMHO made huge gains factoring in everything and that is good as frankly IMHO - we have a lack of Green party representation. But to usurp all Green and LibDem voters as being solely interested in the remain camp would be disenfranchising of those voters. After all - these are local election by local people for local issues - nothing to do with brexit beyond protesting vote people who failed to grasp that a local councilor and coulcil has less influence upon Brexit than they do as an individual who has had a say in the matter. Protest votes irk me, as they highlight the democratic voting and say of the people is not robust enough that they are driven to such voting styles. There again I dispise tactical voting - a tactic that both the LibDem and to a lesser extent the Green party have partaken upon. Then the way the LIb Dems go about local election campaign leaflets - from what I have experience - pretty low and immoral tactics used when you get leaflets demonising and bully wording the other parties and neglecting to say what they actually offer. But lets add some context here about the underhand election tactics being used from everybodies favorite source - https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/may/11/greens-face-more-questions-over-250k-offer-not-to-stand-in-byelection https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/may/11/greens-face... But in fairness to the Lib Dems - they have been pretty solid upon their brexit position (after the vote) - dispite being very adamant about respecting the vote no matter what the result....until they lost. For example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BX1vhfdSKu4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BX1vhfdSKu4 Frankly - party politics needs to change - I'd love that all local councils were independent as party politics and councils offers no advantage, frankly the opposite.
- ptah 8y agoall the analysis i've seen says that brexit is overshadowing local issues. i'm partial to sortition myself: if it's good enough for jury duty, it is good enough for government
- growlist 8y agoOh boy. The Brexit Party did not put up a single candidate in these elections and despite having only launched a few months ago they are leading the polls for the EU elections! I wouldn't count your chickens just yet guv.
- dazc 8y agoWhich are the Brexit supporting parties you are alluding to?
- jimnotgym 8y agoI would argue that they have been rather unique in the British press in keeping the standards of investigative journalism high. No other paper was looking into Cambridge Analytica and their role in Brexit, or the illegal collusion between Vote Leave and Be Leave. They have been fearless when other papers have been complicit
- briandear 8y agoFearless only when their fearlessness supports their viewpoint. They wouldn’t dare look into issues that go against their bias. According to the Guardian, Brexit is 100% bad, when in fact, the issues surrounding Brexit are in shades of grey. It’s not particularly courageous to write articles with which you already support. Courage would be writing articles that challenge their widely held assumptions.
- ljf 8y agoWhile not the majority of their content, they have had a number of pro-brexit opinion pieces and pro-WAB articles from people across the 'left' brexit spectrum and even some centre/right writers.
- ggm 8y agoTheir editorial is pretty evenly split. A lot of readers who are remainer complain about pro brexit positions. The labour party is split. Owen Jones (as an example) and Martin Kettle) certainly don't make your case. Basically, I think you're factually wrong. You're reading selectively if you believe this about the graun
- growlist 8y agoI suppose you also think there was no behind-the-scenes orchestration behind the hounding of Aaron Banks etc., that the Remain campaign was whiter than white, and that the Electoral Commission have been completely impartial..
- C1sc0cat 8y agoYou mean Mr Banks the one with the shady connections to Putin ?
- Veen 8y agoThey've become less economically left-wing over the years, but that's somewhat obscured by their move toward Salon-like content from columnists.
- ptah 8y agonot nearly as loony as daily express and daily mail
- adwww 8y agoI'd counter, especially relative to other contemporary newspapers, the Guardian's quality is consistently high.
- raxxorrax 8y agoTrue, but you can name certain topics where the possibility of them being correct or to give a neutral perspective is quite low. Still better than most, yes.
- AsyncAwait 8y agoGiven their outright lies about Assange over the past while, I'd counter that assertion.
- SolaceQuantum 8y agoSo I'm super uneducated on this, please let me know if you know because I'd love to know more. 1. What specific lies has the guardian spread, and what's the truth? 2. Are there news watchdog organizations for this major newspaper company selling actual proven falsities, and is there legal recourse? I'm not familiar if where the Guardian publishes there is a legal mandate to be a newspaper and not disseminate actual lies.
- AsyncAwait 8y agoSee https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19817959 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19817959
- SolaceQuantum 8y agoHey, thanks a ton for this! Is anyone persecuting The Guardian for this?
- AsyncAwait 8y agoI think Wikileaks wanted to sue them, not sure where that's at, but as far as some watchdog doing so, no, you never get prosecuted for printing what suits the establishment. I guess is similar to how the media pushing for the Iraq War on the premise of WMDs were held accountable, not.
- AsyncAwait 8y ago> Whilst there have always been loony left, misandrist etc. articles in the Guardian Speaking as someone on the left in the UK, I can assure you the Guardian has been more and more centrist as time goes on. I think the confusion is that they do in fact publish loony articles sometimes on social issues, because guess what? That's easy to do without really addressing any economic problems. On the economic front they're as centrist as they get, regularly attacking the likes of Corbyn in ways that the Sun is starting to envy, smearing Assange once they're done profiting off him, printing puff pieces for the Saudi Crown Prince etc. The Guardian is no darling of the (grassroots) left, I can assure you.
- arethuza 8y agoI was looking at their Wikipedia page and I noticed they supported internment in Northern Ireland during the early phase of the Troubles - that's hardly challenging the establishment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Guardian#Northern_Ireland_conflict https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Guardian#Northern_Ireland_... [Internment was probably one of the daftest ideas implemented by a UK government for a long long time.] Edit: Note, I am a regular Guardian and Observer buyer - occasionally get the Times for a bit of balance (though still in mild shock over contents of the Telegraph my wife bought at the weekend as everything else was sold out!)
- bgeeek 8y agoI'm regular reader and I'm not sure that I would agree with you. My problem with the guardian is that it doesn't currently know what it wants be. The other annoyance - the frivolous clickbait articles. They have articles on privacy yet have lots of trackers themselves. They're really no better than what they preach, at least the last time I checked. Still, having said that, I prefer to read a variety of news sources instead of one to hopefully get a more balanced view.
- simongr3dal 8y ago> They have articles on privacy yet have lots of trackers themselves. They're really no better than what they preach, at least the last time I checked. Isn't that a side-effect of having business and editorial separated? The individual journalists don't have any power to change the templates their CMS uses.
- GlennS 8y agoI think they're suffering from the same online short-attention-span clickbait issues as every other news source. But, while they do put out a substantial volume of nonsense, the Guardian also does real journalism. Meanwhile other publications have abandoned that, including the 'balanced' publications.
- swebs 8y ago>Meanwhile other publications have abandoned that, including the 'balanced' publications. Reuters still provides plenty of balanced journalism without dipping into fashionable nonsense opinion pieces.
- Nomentatus 8y agoI would say "excellent but infrequent," not "plenty."
- brmgb 8y ago> I'd argue that to make their supporter model work they've had to drop their editorial standards lower still. I personally mostly stopped reading The Guardian because for all intents and purposes they have become an American journal. They are obsessed with American social issues and and mostly treat the news from an American point of view. I think it's a clear strategic choice of Viner but it saddens me to see what was a great English paper turn into that. I won't even talk about the Opinion part of the journal. Describing it as uneven seems charitable.
- pjc50 8y agoThis seems to be an extension of "people won't pay for local news now the classifieds have died", only that England itself is now too small for a profitable news constituency and the only money to be made is in telling Americans what terrible thing their government has done today. The effect on Scottish press is even more acute; readerships are tiny.
- growlist 8y agoYou articulate it better than I.
- C1sc0cat 8y agoWhat do you mean - don't recall see many devils advocate pieces on the pros and cons of second amendment rights
- rndmio 8y agoI disagree, too many people associate the opinion pieces with the general tone of the rest of the newspaper. All opinion pieces are effectively clickbait (go take a look at the Times or Telegraph (if you dare)). Their general position is generally centrist, they are pretty much LibDems as a newspaper.
- otvsh 8y agoThe thing with newspapers is that they keep posting opinion pieces using the same page design/layout as any other editorial or news piece with a small heading that says "Opinion", thus making it seem serious, and at the same time when they post opinion pieces that go way over the line they use the "but it was just an opinion piece" card. They want to have their cake and eat it as well.
- 52-6F-62 8y agoI think that's a problem of media literacy and not page templating. Sections and categories are not new features for newspapers or magazines. Words have meaning—they're not there for no reason.
- otvsh 8y agoI think a good solution would be to have opinion pieces in another subdomain such as blogs.mynewspaper.com/ephraimgoldstein with a very different design from the rest of the paper.
- frosted-flakes 8y agoLike the way editorials in print newspapers are always left justified (ragged right), while news articles are fully justified[0]. It's subtle, but for anyone who's been reading newspapers regularly, it's immediately obvious. [0] At least, that's the case here in Canada.
- 52-6F-62 8y agoMaybe. I'm saying more that there really isn't a problem on the paper's end. The problem, if there exists one at all, is the reader ignoring words on the page of a publication that is expressly about transmitting words. That said, the Guardian already uses a completely different highlight colour for its Opinion section than it uses for its News section.
- majani 8y agoThe problem simply shifts from pandering to advertisers to pandering to power users.
- sambe 8y agoCould not agree more. There has been both a large quality drop and a big political shift to the left (no idea how replies can claim they have become more and more centrist - that was true until a few years ago but it's swung back). They lost me as a reader sometime in 2017. Thinking about it now, the change likely coincides with this business model.
- asaph 8y ago> However, the operating profit excludes cash payments of between £25-30m for capital costs and other business expenditures, which are an annual draw-down from the Scott Trust, of which The Guardian is part. If these annual costs were included, The Guardian would still be loss-making At first, I misinterpreted this to mean they're counting money granted by a wealthy donor as profit. And without that, they would still be losing money. But, as clarified in the comments below, the Guardian is actually paying the Scott Trust. Also the Scott Trust owns The Guardian. Forgive my confusion. This isn't a straightforward relationship. > Nevertheless, the operating profit marks the completion of a three-year plan that few observers thought likely to succeed, and which leant heavily on a - for British media at least - eccentric business decision to ask readers to contribute financially for something they could get for free. So the business model is asking users for a donation? This sounds more like a non-profit to me. I guess this is better than bleeding millions/year but we can hardly call this a good business.
- Veen 8y agoSo they're counting money granted by a wealthy donor as profit. And without that, they would still be losing money. The Scott Trust isn't a wealthy donor. It's the trust that owns the Guardian and The Observer.
- asaph 8y agoThanks for pointing that out. I clarified that in my edit above.
- SolaceQuantum 8y ago> So they're counting money granted by a wealthy donor as profit. And without that, they would still be losing money. I actually read that as "we are part of a trust that gives 25-30m, and if we didn't need to give these payments we'd be making a profit". Or simply put: No, they are not counting recieving money, they're actually excluding giving money.
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- vfclists 8y agoI wouldn't mind contributing to the Guardian if they weren't such a left wing propaganda rag. The propaganda their financiers are funding must really matter to them if they have subsidized the Guardian for so long. Will any of their journalists be bold enough to launch an indepth investigation into who the Scott Trust are? BBC?
- jimnotgym 8y agoYou can read who the Scott trust are on wikipedia (or indeed Companies House), so you can be bold all on your own. Trying to characterise it as a financier might seem a bit silly afterwards.... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Trust_Limited https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Trust_Limited
- Jonnax 8y agoAll that left wing propaganda seems to be really effective what with years of conservative governance and New Labour....? The most read newspapers in the UK are right wing.
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y agoAll media is propaganda. It's only when we happen to disagree with an outlet's particular brand of propaganda that we call it out as such.
- gridlockd 8y agoThis is a defeatist attitude and it's also wrong. It's certainly possible to tell the difference between Fox News and Breitbart, or CNN and The Guardian. Of course being completely unbiased is impossible, but it's a goal work towards, not something to give up on by default.
- tialaramex 8y ago"All largely propaganda" is a Hafler Trio piece that mostly consists of a soundbite of a BBC (state media of the UK) journalist describing the state media in another country as propaganda, repeated over the longer extract from which it was sampled, so that the effect is to underscore a message that the journalist probably never realised they were communicating - isn't this ALL just propaganda anyway?
- alex_duf 8y agoShameless plug, we're hiring: https://workforus.theguardian.com/careers/digital-development/ https://workforus.theguardian.com/careers/digital-developmen...
- fergie 8y agoAny idea what the top of the pay band is?
- albertgoeswoof 8y agoGlassdoor says for a software engineer there it's between 50-57k GBP, which is about 65-75k USD
- C1sc0cat 8y agoNot to bad for the UK
- ThePadawan 8y agoBut pretty bad for Europe overall (?)
- C1sc0cat 8y agoAs I understand it its good compared to France and Germany - maybe Switzerland would get you more but Switzerland is expensive It is less than a train driver gets for a 4 day week though :-(
- ThePadawan 8y agoI was thinking purchasing parity-adjusted, where Berlin seems a lot more affordable [0]. Switzerland (where I currently live) isn't such a clear-cut picture, as you say [1]. I earn more than what Numbeo suggests, and that is nowhere close to the top of the salary range. [0] https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?country1=United+Kingdom&city1=London&country2=Germany&city2=Berlin&amount=4%2C750.00&displayCurrency=GBP https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou... [1] https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?country1=United+Kingdom&city1=London&country2=Switzerland&city2=Zurich&amount=4%2C750.00&displayCurrency=GBP https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...
- briandear 8y agoYou know, I don’t particularly agree with the leftist bent of the Guardian. However, that being said, the Guardian is, by far, one of the highest quality publications available today. While the views don’t always align with mine, I can respect quality. Wishing the folks at the Guardian continued success; I appreciate being exposed to alternative views that consistently challenge my own.
- meigwilym 8y agoWhat publication would you recommend for someone on the opposite side of the political spectrum? The Times has a paywall and the Telegraph is only good for rugby.
- malandrew 8y agoDon't know about the UK, but the National Review, The American Conservative and National Affairs are pretty solid conservative journalism.
- gridlockd 8y agoCall me a dreamer, but I believe unbiased reporting should be the goal of journalism and I associate a "political bent" with poor quality. You must be associating (lack of) quality with how sensationalist/tabloid-style a publication is, which is more superficial. > I appreciate being exposed to alternative views that consistently challenge my own Which is why a publication should aim to challenge its readers with opposing opinion pieces, instead of constantly reinforcing their beliefs (aka "the easy way out").
- sgift 8y ago> Call me a dreamer, but I believe unbiased reporting should be the goal of journalism and I associate a "political bent" with poor quality. If you want "unbiased reporting" you get articles like: Angela Merkel ate Aspargus yesterday. That's unbiased. It's also irrelevant. Anything more interesting will always have a bias as long as it is written by humans.
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- narnianal 8y agoI don't really get this "have the old media survive" stuff. Media always need resources to get produced, no matter which format. So they are never independent. Whoever provides these resources has the power. But that's not a big deal because it applies to almost everything. And if you say profit is the master ,then you need to do attention whoring and advertisement. If politics is your master then you do propaganda. If a super rich is your master, then you will keep silent about their allys and denounce their enemies. All that is normal. It's not perfect but it can't be improved either. You can only exchange one master for another. And you also don't have to worry that there won't be a master. Of course there will always be people who want to reach out to N other people for a number of reasons. Some people just like the attention, some use it for power plays, some use it to convince people to do something. And no matter what's in it, there will also always be consumers. Because they too like a good show and some attention. So honestly we should simply not mind. If you work in the industry see where things are going and develop skills in that direction. If you own a medium, try to innovate and/or buy developing new media. If you are a consumer simply consume what you like the most.
- zoul 8y ago> Media always need resources to get produced, no matter which format. So they are never independent. Whoever provides these resources has the power. (…) It's not perfect but it can't be improved either. You can only exchange one master for another. There’s a big difference between being dependent on (a) a wealthy owner, (b) big advertisers, and (c) readers.
- organsnyder 8y agoI'm not sure I've ever seen a successful news organization that hasn't relied on some combination of all three.
- chimprich 8y agoWell the Guardian has managed to be successful without a wealthy owner.
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- raesene9 8y agoOne thing the Guardian gets right (in my opinion) is their online subscriber model. I subscribed to it, the cost is reasonable (£5/month) and it was easy to sign up and is easy to cancel. Recently I wanted to get some news from a more right-wing perspective, so I looked at paying for the The times. Their site advertises a two month £7.99 subscription, which is fine. However what you don't find till you go to sign up is after that it's £26/month which isn't cheap and, far worse, to cancel a subscription you have to phone them. This kind of classic dark pattern (easy to sign-up hard to cancel) was enough for me to cancel out and not complete the sub.
- dazc 8y agoI fell for the Times subscription too. Fair enough, I did expect the cost to increase after the initial promotion period but not the hurdles required to cancel. But then, when you subscribe and find you're seeing as many ads as you do with free to view alternatives it's not surprising they are going to rely on keeping you locked in for as long as possible?
- nottorp 8y agoYou only find out the real non introductory price after you subscribe? Is that even legal in the EU? Oh right, the UK wants to exit the EU... I wonder why...
- Freak_NL 8y agoI've setup a yearly donation of €12. As someone outside of the UK, The Guardian has proven to be one of the few sources of reliable, in-depth reporting on the Brexit shambles (I do miss ColinCaserole though). Ideally, I would be able to set up an all-you-can-eat subscription to a number of well-regarded international newspapers for languages that I am proficient in and access them at will from both a single portal (like Blendle, but absolutely not paying per article) and the newspapers own websites.
- retube 8y ago> The Guardian has proven to be one of the few sources of reliable, in-depth reporting on the Brexit shambles ha ha sure
- duxup 8y agoFeel free to disagree but generically around HN other users expect more than "ha ha sure".
- Emma_Goldman 8y ago>'The Guardian has proven to be one of the few sources of reliable, in-depth reporting on the Brexit shambles.' In many ways, The Guardian is a remarkable paper. It does not publish falsehoods, or - for the most part - appeal to the worst in people. It is committed to the defence of civil liberties, and to ensuring that journalism is open to everyone, regardless of their income. But it's coverage of Brexit is highly partisan. It is not unreliable in the sense of being inaccurate; it is simply one side of the conversation.
- duxup 8y agoTo be clear I'm not targeting you with the following comment. > highly partisan I don't know what anyone means by that anymore. I'll see people cite such things but and then they'll state "look at the front page now" and list articles. As if the front page has to have two or more opposite articles for every topic, or a paper must provide a ying to every yang (and possibly proportionately) like we can't handle it if we don't see our POV explicitly cited anymore... This is really more of a side rant, for all I know I would entirely agree with your statement if I read the guardian more.
- spoovy 8y agoEven when I was a lefty in my naive years I found the Grauniad smug and offputting in it's tone. Now I'm older and wiser I find it ridiculous too.
- _pmf_ 8y agoWould like to know how much they receive via Brave/BAT: https://batgrowth.com/publishers/website https://batgrowth.com/publishers/website Could be a nice boost to adoption if it's significant, but maybe they want to keep it their secret ...
- skilled 8y agoThe Guardian is one of the most toxic news sites around. A lot of their pieces are complete fluff filled with snarky opinions. It's pretty damning when you read a "news" article and it sounds like a little kid rambling on.
- tim333 8y agoDo you have an example of them being toxic? I read it a fair bit and there's some pc/lefty silliness but it seldom sees toxic.
- 781 8y agoSome example of quality Guardian writing: > Like walking into a space and suddenly realising everyone there is white. You know that feeling? When you go to a rooftop bar in Peckham and you worry that you’ve inadvertently stumbled into a Klan meeting? Just imagine the same text with white replaced by black and Klan by gang. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/22/avengers-endgame-superheroes-marvel https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/22/avenge...
- MrsPeaches 8y agoHere you go: Like walking into a space and suddenly realising everyone there is black. You know that feeling? When you go to a rooftop bar in Peckham and you worry that you’ve inadvertently stumbled into a gang meeting? Thoughts? Does this sound more or less racist? Or are they both the same level of racism? Does it matter what race the person is who wrote it? Genuine questions here.
- gjm11 8y agoThat's an opinion column about a superhero movie. I don't know about you, but I wouldn't expect subtle sociopolitical analysis in that sort of material in any newspaper.
- 781 8y agoThat was exactly my point. The Guardian casually drops anti-white bigotry in articles as random as a superhero movie review. If that statement had the word black instead of white, the next day the author would have been fired and an extensive apology published on the front page.
- StanislavPetrov 8y agoPT Barnum knew how profitable this business model was years ago. There's one born any minute. Its a pity, too, because The Guardian used to do real journalism. Now its a rag pushing conspiracy theories and MI6 propaganda. Unbelievably, they still haven't retracted their debunked story about Paul Manfort turning invisible and meeting Assange in the Ecuadorian Embassy three times. Embarrassing.
- threeseed 8y agoWhy would they retract the story ? They had sources whom I am sure they trusted and since it happened in 2016 before the change of the Ecuadorian government it's plausible that there was implicit support for the meeting. Assange was hardly some innocent bystander during the last US election so he definitely has form. Fact is that when you have a situation like this we simply don't know what the truth is so who is it to say that the Guardian is wrong here.
- StanislavPetrov 8y agoThere was no mention of any meeting whatsoever in the Mueller report. There was no mention of any meeting whatsoever in the indictments and trials of Manafort. There is no video footage or picture of Manafort ever being anywhere near the embassy, or even in London, during any of the three times that the Guardian claimed they met. Your tinfoil hat has to be very, very tight to believe that Manafort could have secretly met with the most watched man in the world, in the city with the densest surveillance network in the world, without anyone seeing him, without a single picture being taken, without any evidence at all that he had every been there. Not only did he do supposedly do this, but he supposedly did this three times!! Its been many months since the story was published, and the Guardian has shown absolutely no evidence of any meeting. The fact is that no matter what you think of Assange, Manafort, Trump, or anyone else, this is a stunning journalistic failure. The fact that the Guardian continues to stand by this story (silently) without offering any evidence of its veracity is a terrible stain on what was once a very good paper.
- cosmodisk 8y agoI do read it quite often, however I would never ever pay a penny for it until it opens up comments under all the articles and not just some vanilla news,where you can be pretty sure there won't be much of a debate. There many ways to achieve self moderation if hiring extra staff isn't an option.
- hellllllllooo 8y agoI would be happy if comments on contentious articles were only open to donating members so they have some skin in the game and are contributing to the cost of moderation. Problem is they become full of drive-by trolls if left fully open.
- cosmodisk 8y agoIn the country where I come from,we've got a very popular online news website. comments are are split into two categories: registered (facebook,google+) and anonymous. Users also have an ability to upvote/downvote or flag comments.It does work pretty well tbh.
- hellllllllooo 8y agoMaybe. I think if someone visits just to troll having to donate to a publication they dislike might be a reasonable deterrent and it improves user tracking for moderation. It could serve to focus the conversation to people who at least respect the publication as a whole even if they disagree with a particular article. Seeing comments by people who clearly just dislike the Guardian don't really add much. Comments like "Typical left wing Guardian nonsense" are pretty common and useless.
- admiralspoo 8y agoThe Guardian has become a clickbait rag in the last decade. I can't say I'm happy their bad behavior is being rewarded.
- qmanjamz 8y agoI agree this news is pretty sad. The Guardian has no objectivity any more. I wish it were possible for newspapers to survive as non-partisan entities, but it's looking less and less likely that'll ever be true.
- mhh__ 8y agoDo you read the Guardian? I do, practically everyday, and I can say - As someone is centre-right, i.e. not the guardian's idea of their readers - that just isn't true. This comment ignores the existence of Owen Jones, of course, but still.
- basetop 8y agoWasn't 1998 the midpoint of one the greatest economic booms in history? Kinda like the one we are currently in? As a 90s kid I remember hearing about how record unemployment and stock records on TV back then. It's amazing that the guardian hasn't had a profit in 20 years. This just shows that major news companies are not real companies, but state or systematic enterpises. I can see microsoft or google going out of business sometime in the future. But I can't see the guardian or the nytimes or any of the major news companies going out of business. Because they are part of the system though they claim to be the ones keeping an eye on the system. If I were a betting man, I'd bet that in 100 years, amazon won't exist. But I'd never bet that the nytimes wouldn't exist. Though amazon may be a trillion dollar company, it's still a company. Whiles the nytimes is more than a system. It's part of the power structure.
- wpdev_63 8y agoThey're an excellent publication that publish stories[0] that the New York times, LA times, and other institutional newspapers would not dare to touch. If you value your privacy and your constitutional rights - please consider donating to the Guardian. They are one of the very few news organizations that are not censored by the US/UK gov't. [0]:https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/the-nsa-files https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/the-nsa-files
- jammmety 8y agoWhich news organisations are censored by the UK government?
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- throwaway190102 8y agoUhhh, the BBC is funded by the UK Government...
- bsamuels 8y agothere's plenty of UK news outlets that are not the BBC I'm also interested in hearing how the UK/US government is allegedly censoring news outlets, that's a pretty big claim for a top level comment
- wpdev_63 8y agoThere's a bit of censorship that goes on behind the scenes, i'll let you google for specific examples. Highly recommend watching 'kill the messenger'. Fun movie to watch and it will give you a sense of what i am talking about.
- zymhan 8y agoSelf-censorship is a thing. News organizations have sat on stories in the past for fear of rocking some boat too hard.
- simonebrunozzi 8y agoHN is weird sometimes: this submission of mine was made earlier, on the same subject, and only attracted a few sparse comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19803586 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19803586 I am always interested in looking at cases like these and try to discern why one submission received a lot more attention than another one. I guess it's more haruspex than science.
- KindOne 8y agoI would guess it depends at what time you post. Posting at 3am would have different results than a 3pm post.
- reilly3000 8y agoIt’s all about that headline. Yours conveys a reference to information, this one conveys the interesting part up front. In a world where both print and digital media are seeing consolidation and bankruptcy almost daily, this is a story of an outlet with quality journalism making a profit. It made my Friday.
- rahimnathwani 8y agoThe headline is incorrect. The Guardian recorded positive EBITDA, but did not record positive Operating Profit (almost universally used to refer to EBIT). The original source[0] seems to deliberately conflate the two measures: "GNM has achieved its break even goal delivering an operating profit at EBITDA level of £0.8 million" The BBC article then parroted the 'operating profit' part, leaving out the 'at EBITDA level' qualifier, thus turning a slightly misleading statement into a factually incorrect one. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/p/bcd4a https://www.theguardian.com/p/bcd4a