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dannyobrienHNSource author
Business & incomeExperience excerpt · English

Ragebait isn't the only business model for supporting honest journalism, and one of the lessons I …

… Ragebait isn't the only business model for supporting honest journalism, and one of the lessons I learned at the Guardian is that the actual business models can be surprising and frequently unrelated to news reporting. For many years, the Guardian was kept solvent through used car sales via Autocar, the most profitable asset in the Scott Trust. (One of the reasons why the Guardian was so early going online is that its editors, in particular Alan Rusbridger, recognised presciently that the Web was going to absolutely gut Autocar's profits, and so they needed to get ahead of the game.) You will be surprised about how many booms and busts in UK media industry have been determined by audience-pullers like crosswords, bingo, photos of naked models, and sudoku.

Original discussionThe Guardian flourishes without a paywall519 source comments · at import
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Analemma_HN

The Guardian is extremely-polarized ragebait. I don't mean that as an attack or dismissal-- they do have good reporting sometimes-- but you have to keep that in mind when talking about their business model and what it implies for the broader industry. Any doofus on Substack or YouTube can make a living posting ragebait because it keeps engagement high. The question is whether the same business model (no paywall, unobtrusive ads) can work for sober and honest journalism, and IMO the answer sadly appears to be no, because not enough people value that to pay for it.

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blisterpeanutsHN

Pre-Trump, I had a paid online subscription to Guardian for a time, because it was so well written and informative. After 2016, however, they seemed to adopt a firm anti-MAGA stance which I found to be biased and off-putting. Their highly critical stance against Israel after the Hamas attacks of October 2023 was the last straw. Then, they withdrew from the X platform and now they might as well not exist, as far as I'm concerned. I think that was a mistake, given their significant following on X, but I guess they felt they don't need it.

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lmzHN

> For many years, the Guardian was kept solvent through used car sales via Autocar, the most profitable asset in the Scott Trust. Wasn't that Auto Trader , not Autocar?

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mmoossHN

Most US newspapers will financed to a great extent by classified ads, until the Internet destroyed that model - very many never recovered. The NY Times is financied in part by people who will pay for crosswords, cooking, games, and other non-news products.

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