The Guardian has been pioneering the wikileaks/NSA investigative stuff; they're also making a huge play to become the #1 left/liberal online news source of the

The Guardian has been pioneering the wikileaks/NSA investigative stuff; they're also making a huge play to become the #1 left/liberal online news source of the English-speaking web (nipping at the heels of the much more staid NY Times). The existence of the Trust enables them to do stuff that would be toxic to other newspapers, namely to push agendas that advertisers wouldn't approve of. But the main thing I think they're doing is that they've recognized the general decline of investigative journalism in the USA and (to a lesser extent) the UK, and identified it as a gap in the market that gives them a niche to expand into. (Here the USA's lack of genuine national newspapers -- USA Today doesn't count -- plays against it; it means The Guardian, a national paper from a nation of 61 million people, can punch at or above the weight of any regional US paper.)