The Guardian’s losses mount

“COMMENT is free, but facts are sacred” wrote C.P. Scott, a great editor of the Manchester Guardian, as the newspaper was known until 1959. The trouble is it’s getting harder to make money from either. Many British newspapers are under pressure as print revenues fall and digital advertising struggles to fill the gap. But the Guardian’s rapid online expansion in recent years and its rising costs mean its position is particularly precarious. So far it has struggled to translate its approximately 155m unique monthly online browsers into higher digital-ad revenues.

This hit home as the Guardian Media Group (GMG), its parent company, announced pre-tax losses of £173m ($264m) on July 27th, its biggest ever dip into the red. Some £104m of this comes from GMG writing down the value of its stake in Ascential, a publicly listed information and events company, as well as additional restructuring costs. But that still leaves GMG with a loss of £69m. And given the Guardian’s substantial presence online, the decline in GMG’s digital revenue, from £84m in 2015 to £82m, may be of most concern, even though for now the fall is slight.