Joshua Sur­tees

"Do you think the UK Guardian is go­ing to sur­vive?" some­body asked me last week­end and I gave them the blunt an­swer: the pa­per, which has ex­ist­ed since 1821, has guar­an­teed its sur­vival for at least an­oth­er 30 years by sell­ing off a ma­jor as­set it owned –the clas­si­fied car sales web­site Au­to Trad­er–last year for around �650m.

The mon­ey will sit in the com­pa­ny's ac­counts as a cash re­serve along­side an ex­ist­ing trust fund that is pro­tect­ed by its own­ers, the Scott Trust. Guardian Me­dia Group has sold al­most all of the as­sets it pre­vi­ous­ly owned over the past few years, in­clud­ing dozens of re­gion­al news­pa­pers and a ra­dio sta­tion.

The cash re­serve will fund the pa­per's Pulitzer-prize win­ning jour­nal­ism for an­oth­er gen­er­a­tion but no busi­ness mod­el so far in­vent­ed seems able to stop the UK Guardian from los­ing be­tween �15m and �30m per year.

Re­duc­ing head­count to cut costs in ed­i­to­r­i­al de­part­ments has proved dif­fi­cult be­cause of the pow­er of the union with­in the or­gan­i­sa­tion. In­stead, mon­ey sav­ing has come through vol­un­tary re­dun­dan­cy pack­ages with hefty pay­outs in ed­i­to­r­i­al and through re­struc­tur­ing the mar­ket­ing, ad­ver­tis­ing and cre­ative de­part­ments.

The pa­per has be­come sig­nif­i­cant­ly slim­mer in terms of pag­i­na­tion while sig­nif­i­cant­ly in­creas­ing in price from 60p ($6) in 2005 to �1.80 ($18) in 2015.

In that con­text, the Trinidad Ex­press' de­ci­sion to raise the cov­er price long held by Trinidad's three main news­pa­pers is hard­ly earth-shat­ter­ing. The pre­vi­ous price rise in 2009 took the pa­per from a stag­ger­ing­ly cheap $1 up to $2. Be­fore that the last price in­crease was in 1999.

Both the Trinidad Guardian and News­day have shared sim­i­lar mod­els.

But it doesn't mat­ter whether you keep news­pa­per prices low or in­crease them year on year–nei­ther strat­e­gy is go­ing to save news­pa­pers in the UK or in Trinidad. The long slow death of the news­pa­per be­gan at the dawn of high-speed in­ter­net a decade ago and prob­a­bly has an­oth­er decade to go, at most. At first I fought against it but now I have ac­cept­ed it.

Vir­tu­al­ly no­body un­der the age of 45 buys a dai­ly news­pa­per. And judg­ing by neg­a­tive re­ac­tions to the Ex­press pay­wall, they won't be buy­ing it dig­i­tal­ly ei­ther. Per­haps they ought to re­con­sid­er.

I could pre­dict that in ten years� when print­ed pa­pers are ex­tinct and the for­mat of news is dras­ti­cal­ly dif­fer­ent –we will laugh at the out­rage of peo­ple when asked to pay for dig­i­tal prod­ucts.

Con­sumers have come to ex­pect that every­thing on a screen ought, by right, to be free. The things we ac­cess with­in sec­onds and con­sume all day every­day with our eyes, brains, mouse but­tons, fin­ger­tips and thumbs. The things that shape our days.

Of course, on­line con­tent is not en­tire­ly free: we pay our month­ly WiFi bills. But they sus­tain the tele­coms com­pa­nies not the me­dia or­gan­i­sa­tions which are left to pay their ed­i­tors and jour­nal­ists from ever dwin­dling pots of mon­ey.

To tran­si­tion from a print to dig­i­tal busi­ness mod­el, ac­cord­ing to the UK Guardian's strat­e­gy, re­quires in­creased on­line ad­ver­tis­ing rev­enue as well as lever­ag­ing the brand through brand-re­lat­ed spin­offs: mas­ter­class­es taught by jour­nal­ists, a dat­ing site for read­ers and a mem­ber­ship scheme that one might ex­pect of a po­lit­i­cal par­ty; read­ers pledge their al­le­giance and con­tribute mon­ey to sup­port the or­gan­i­sa­tion.

So far, the UK Guardian claims to have 100,000 mem­bers in 200 coun­tries. And that in­ter­na­tion­al as­pect is fun­da­men­tal to its fu­ture. Its dig­i­tal ad­ver­tis­ing rev­enue has risen by 30 per cent by launch­ing US and Aus­tralian ver­sions of the web­site; bring­ing in more glob­al users and in­creas­ing the amount of con­tent and pages (ie ad­ver­tis­ing in­ven­to­ry.) Trinidad news­pa­per web­sites have a tiny con­sumer base –an adult pop­u­la­tion of just un­der a mil­lion and a di­as­po­ra pop­u­la­tion of around half a mil­lion–com­pared to glob­al web­sites like the UK Guardian which at­tracts 3.9m unique users per day and 40m per month.

With Trinidad's pop­u­la­tion un­like­ly to rise it's hard to see how dig­i­tal ad rev­enue will in­crease. At the mo­ment Trinidad's ma­jor cor­po­ra­tions and pub­lic bod­ies are still com­mit­ted to print ad­ver­tis­ing which they see as more im­pact­ful than web ads (and they're right.)

So, where­as a pay­wall would kill off the UK Guardian's en­tire au­di­ence, busi­ness mod­el and ex­pan­sion strat­e­gy, the Trinidad Ex­press has lit­tle to lose. It makes very lit­tle prof­it (pos­si­bly a loss) from the web­site it pro­duces each day and its board has de­cid­ed there's no point giv­ing away on­line con­tent for free any longer.

The im­pact of this de­ci­sion will have to be mit­i­gat­ed quite heav­i­ly, how­ev­er, since what the Ex­press has ef­fec­tive­ly done is hand over a huge chunk of T&T's dig­i­tal news au­di­ence to the Guardian. They will rea­son: "what good is an au­di­ence you can't mon­e­tise?" But their pop­u­lar­i­ty will nose­dive by block­ing peo­ple off, mak­ing sto­ries un­share­able on so­cial me­dia and hard­er to read on mo­bile. This will have a neg­a­tive ef­fect on their brand.

They've gone brave and bet on their ex­ist­ing au­di­ence fol­low­ing them in­to the dig­i­tal fu­ture and pay­ing for the priv­i­lege. In time they may be vin­di­cat­ed. In the short term they will need to make sure the trick­le of peo­ple that do sub­scribe are sold a world-class prod­uct if they have any hope of that trick­le be­com­ing a stream.