The Guardian at the gate

By Michael Wolff 02 June 14

The Guardian, financed through a trust created by its then owners in the Thirties, has traditionally been organised as something like a private-equity firm, with investments in a variety of businesses whose profits went to supporting a newspaper. Earlier this year, with the newspaper costing more than the investments yielded, it liquidated most of its holdings, converting itself into an entity more like a wealth-management company or, perhaps, even a family office, wherein capital could be tapped to support the interest of the family ...

US expansion has long been a Guardian dream. For some years now, there has been no growth left for it in the UK market - with circulation and advertising in perilous decline - but the US market seemed to the Guardian management full of opportunities for a serious but stylish, left-leaning news outlet. The obvious models, albeit on something of the opposite political spectrum, were the Financial Times and the Economist, which had adroitly managed to internationalise their brands with an investment in US distribution (quite a substantial investment). But the Guardian was looking for something more, something transformational. Like Superman blasting off from the doomed planet of Krypton, or the Corleone family leaving New York for Vegas, or even like Rupert Murdoch, the Guardian's bugbear, outgrowing London and moving his headquarters to New York, the Guardian, by setting up shop in Manhattan - on the corner of Spring Street and Broadway in Soho - had a kind of spunky or wildly speculative confidence that it could become an American voice. Not just a British voice in the US ...

And then there was WikiLeaks and the Guardian's partnership with Julian Assange. The Guardian's publication of stolen US State Department documents made it one of the most visible news organisations in the world. It was a development near comparable to when CNN, then a backwater cable channel, found itself as practically the sole US news organisation on the ground in Baghdad as the Gulf War began in 1990, elevating it to international renown. Except for one difference: the Guardian's economic prospects were not enhanced by Assange and WikiLeaks ...

News outlets want to break big stories but at the same time not be overwhelmed by them - a certain detachment is well advised. It is an artful line. But the Guardian essentially went into the Edward Snowden business - and continues in it. It's a complex business, too: to ally yourself with larger-than-life, novelistic characters, first Assange, and then Snowden, and stranger-than-strange middle men, like the Guardian's contract columnist Glenn Greenwald, who brought in the story. The effort to pretend that the story is straight up good and evil, that this is journalism pure and simple, unalloyed public interest, without peculiar nuances and rabbit holes and obvious contradictions, is really quite a trick ...

http://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/comment/articles/2014-06/02/michael-wolff-the-guardian