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Every so often, though, you stumble on a Sean Smith. In 2003, the Guardian gave its celebrated war photographer a training course and a video camera, then told him to go to Iraq and play around with it. In the past three years, Smith has been nominated for an Emmy and won an award from the Royal Television Society, the first news stills photographer to be so honored.
Under Rusbridger's stewardship, the Guardian site has become one of the newspaper industry's most lauded, winning a kind of online Oscar called a Webby as best newspaper site three years running. Guardian.co.uk claims around 29 million unique monthly visitors, which puts it atop a fierce three-way tussle with the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph for the most online readers. The Mail and Telegraph have actually caught up quickly in the past year. But Charlie Beckett, a professor at the London School of Economics and author of SuperMedia, argues that it matters little which newspaper claims more online readers. "Whether one of them's got 15 million and the others have got 10 million is irrelevant economically," says Beckett. "Rusbridger's job is to save his own community and build on it so he can sell them stuff in the next phase — it could be a ticket to a conference, it could be a social-networking site, anything. The other papers are doing the same thing for their communities. I think Rusbridger made the right business decision."
In a sense, the Guardian's community is unique, and bears little resemblance to the competition's. Only a third of Guardian.co.uk's readers live in the U.K. Some seven and a half million of them live in the U.S., making the Guardian perhaps the least local newspaper in the world. In Oct. 2007, the Guardian made that fact clear by launching www.guardianamerica.com, with its own American editor, political-news veteran Michael Tomasky, and a dedicated staff of 12 journalists. Clearly, the newspaper is staking its survival on becoming a global news brand.
But it's still got a long way to go. In the year ended March 2008, Guardian News and Media Division lost $52 million on turnover of $520 million and figures for the year ending March 2009 are likely to be substantially worse when they are released in the summer. (Fortunately, the Guardian is owned by the nonprofit Scott Trust, whose purpose is to safeguard it from the chill wind of the market.) Like other online newspapers, the Guardian has yet to figure out how to monetize its millions of visitors — in other words, how to make a buck off them. According to calculations made by Digital Deliverance's Crosbie, it takes 16 online readers to make up for one lost print reader on the bottom line. "If you do the math, you see they're never going to make the money they were used to making," he says.
Even so, some of Europe's most hide-bound institutions are realizing that drastic change may not be such a bad thing. France's truculent leftist daily, Libération, was founded by Jean-Paul Sartre and a group of former Maoists in 1973. In its early firebrand days, employees from the editor to the janitor all received the same salary. It's been on life support for years, and it's a wonder no one's pulled the plug.
Today, Libé has a new benefactor in the form of Edouard de Rothschild, and a new unstarry-eyed editor, Laurent Joffrin. The paper flirted briefly with break-even in 2007 and it's trying to find a way to go post-ideological, sort of. The Net, conferences, French open-shirted philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy shilling with advertisers — the new Libé will try almost anything. Joffrin even invited Carla Bruni, wife of France's rightist President Nicolas Sarkozy, to serve as celebrity editor for a day, but that was a step too far and Joffrin was forced to rescind the invitation amid howls of protest from employees. "If all we're doing is telling readers who's on the new équipe de France soccer team, we're dead," says Max Armanet, the Libération editor charged with finding new ways to get readers fired up again. "It's my job to make people desire us — I am the editor in charge of Love. I can't tell you whether we'll be here in five years, but I can tell you it's a passionate undertaking." Passion probably isn't a bad place to start.