I would do anything for the Guardian…but I won’t do that

Ed Mayo’s done a nice blog following the sad and untimely death of Stephen Lloyd.

Ed writes of an attempt to persuade The Guardian that it’s future lay in its readers-as-owners. It has a readership who are more active in political and community circles, and has a clear set of political values that don’t find expression anywhere else in a national newspaper, first in the UK but increasingly globally as their journalism makes friends in other countries.

But it’s got a problem. Print circulation and its ad revenues are declining, whilst the massive global audience doesn’t yet equate to similar ad income. The gamble is that advertising from the web can take up the slack in the medium-to-longer term before the pile of cash the Guardian Media Group have from the sale of various cannily purchased businesses like AutoTrader runs out and is no longer able to subsidise the annual losses. They’re apparently doing better in this race than many thought, but it’s still touch and go.

The idea was that readers wouldn’t pay to be subscriber-readers as much as member-owners. They’d be sustaining an institution that supports the production of the kind of journalism that Nick Davies does, as opposed to the current status where if you want to support it, you have to buy the finished product. Journalism as a service, rather than as a product.

I don’t buy it, because I don’t have the need for all of it. I’ll recycle more than I’ll read, and something about the nature of buying some thing as a product makes me resistant to appreciating that I’m buying the service. I’d much rather make an honest relationship of the thing and just give them a sum each year to keep on keeping on — to sustain them; it’s very similar to how Taz works, for example.

Of course, as we know from Community Shares, the more longer-term involvement in governance you have, the more you can raise, and here’s where one hits the rocks.

Power is a great thing to sell to thousands, even millions of people, because beyond a certain scale, the marginal costs are close to zero. The downside is that if you have a situation in which that power is shared amongst a relatively small group of people, then they’re going to perceive this is in a potentially threatening way.

And so it was. I did a bit of work for them thinking through how membership of the Guardian might actually work, from the level of the paying punter through to the Board which appoints the Editor.

We had a meeting with some senior execs to run through the ideas, and what stood out was the sheer horror of the notion of being actually owned by readers. It was fine for journalists to engage below the line, but heaven forbid one let the loons into positions of actual power.

I’d previously thought such visceral antipathy to one’s customers was only found in football club boardrooms, but here we were in a bastion of liberal journalism with the notion of community ownership being castigated as ‘a bit too much like the Labour Party’.

They are debates to be had about how one balances these things, and whether, in the end, readers could be persuaded to support it. None of these got going because the idea was too horrifying in theory to be worth exploring whether it might work in practice.

Others are going to get this right though, and be happy to give power to people to reader-owners who can be trusted to be the only people have both its best interests at heart and the ability to financially support it, and I’ve been working with a few for the last few years. Hopefully, The Guardian will join in eventually.