Nick Hillman of the Higher Education Policy Institute has recently been yukking it up in the papers in favour of Oxbridge getting to put its prices up more (I shorten).
That Hillman is a former Tory SPAD and failed Tory candidate is no surprise but I am really quite impressed that he lists as one of his publications a pamphlet for the Institute of Government on how to be a SPAD. Maybe he could start a thinktank on Better SPADs, or even better thinktanks.
I wondered what rock he’d crawled out from under when I saw his piece in the Grauniad Online. I once wrote about the inevitable “centerising” of The G and I understand the relentless commercial logic. But I still find the fact that they take pieces from people like Hillman rather depressing.
That’s what I don’t understand, one of hte reasons I see no point in reading the guardian is that they insist on being even handed and centrist. If I want to read a political screed by an unhinged reality denying right winger I would go and buy a mail or torygraph or suchlike, not the guardian. Like new labour, they’d actually gain in vote share if they moved back to the left.
The answers can be found here:
http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/uk-newspapers-ranked-total-readership-print-and-online
The Mail Online has caught up in readership, but everyone knows the commenters there are lunatics. MO gets a lot of its hits from the celeb news etc. The G is pretty much still the behemoth of online news/political comment below the line in the UK. That’s the commercial logic of the centerising…
Sure, but as Private eye keeps pointing out, they aren’t actually making any money off anything and have been losing it for years. Trying to be the Amazon of online news only works if you can either keep growing into new areas or monetise it. The Guardian has done neither.
Well, last time I looked (2013 figures) G Online made more money than Mail Online. Now it may or may not be enough to make up for the ongoing troubles of the paper side (depends how you look at the accounting) but they declared a profit for 2013 on the back of the digital side.
I think Guardian’s weaknesses are no different to most of the UK newspaper business (and arguably the US too). Nobody has really found a stable model yet.
Hmm, if the online side is making money, it would make financial sense to shut down the actual print newspaper. I’m surprised they’ve found a way to make money from the online stuff though, I would have thought I’d have heard by now if they had, but have obviously missed something, do you have a link?
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-07-16/guardian-media-returns-to-profit-going-against-the-grain-on-ads.html
I haven’t seen 2014 figures, so maybe it’s fallen apart…