The beleaguered Guardian, kept afloat by the value of its stake in used car mag and online site Auto Trader, is to raise its weekday cover price from January 12 to £1.40 from £1.20 and its Saturday price (Saturday being probably the only issue that makes money) to £2.50 from £2.30, putting it way ahead of any of its rivals apart from the Financial Times.
You have to ask yourself whether the so-called managers at Guardian Towers, currently ensconced in flashy new quarters in London’s revived King’s Cross (left), have taken final leave of their senses.
The newspaper’s circulation has sunk like a stone in recent years and this looks just like another way of milking the declining number of people who still buy it (less than 200,000 at last count).
The paper, still the flagship of the liberal/left in the UK and famous for its investigations of everything from phone hacking to Edward Snowden’s revelations about the nefarious doings of the US National Security Agency and its British patsies at GCHQ, should be trying to appeal to young, leftish, student-type people – of whom there a hell of a lot in the UK. But at these prices for a newspaper which, most days, has very little news in it?
But they all read it online, they might say. Well make it an online business.
The management of the Guardian is a shambles and it will see off the old paper – and possibly the online business – before too long.
Get a Waitrose loyalty card (for free) and you can get it for nothing.
