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How much money has The Guardian made off Edward Snowden?
by aet 13y ago
How much money has The Guardian made off Edward Snowden?
- delinka 13y agoI came here wondering whether this exact issue weighed on their decision. Big Headliner == Candidate for Person of the Year?
- robotmay 13y agoProbably not that much, to be honest. Most people here in the UK neither know nor care about him. Which is a real tragedy, but people just don't understand the technology side of it, and probably don't care anyway as they think it doesn't apply to them. These stories have been popular with the Guardian's standard readership, but inside the UK at least, I doubt it has increased its market.
- aet 13y agoI'm thinking the Guardian picked up some U.S. readers, but have no evidence.
- eterm 13y agoThe Guardian have had a large focus to try to pick up US readership for a while (e.g. They launched CIF America). The NSA coverage has probably helped them in that mission, in fact it is probably motivating a lot of their NSA coverage, the UK "switched off" over the issue almost day one.
- dublinben 13y agoTheir switch to a .com domain, and expansion of US-focused coverage was well-timed to coincide with these revelations.
- danieldk 13y agoDoes it matter? It's not as if The Guardian bought Snowden's information in a bidding race. Snowden trusted Greenwald, who happened to be associated with The Guardian. A newspaper should be judged on quality. If this leads to more income, all the better.
- dllthomas 13y agoRight. We want doing responsible journalism to lead to more money.
- aet 13y agoIndeed, but, the profit motive prevented the timely release of the documents they have in they possesion. Are they still sitting on any docs?
- dllthomas 13y agoThey have reputedly released roughly 1% of what they received. I think that simply dumping the docs would have had less impact than the steady stream of new revelations, but certainly I could be mistaken...
- icelancer 13y agoThey are releasing documentation based on Snowden's desired timeline, not based on some profit motive you are insinuating.
- aet 13y agoWhy should we care about his desired timeline? The docs are not his property.
- dllthomas 13y agoIf he did not have an expectation that they would follow his timeline, he would be less likely to leak the docs to them, and possibly less likely to leak the docs at all. It's not like Snowden couldn't have just dumped all the docs on us if that was his intent.
- aet 13y agoSo we have to sit around while The Guardian decides which docs are important..
- simonw 13y agoConsidering how expensive this kind of reporting is, in terms of legal fees, travel expenses and journalist salaries, I wouldn't be suprised if they made a loss. It's not the most advertiser-friendly story either.
- antidaily 13y ago$6k easily.