This is a lightly edited transcript of the June 29 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.
Perry Bacon: Welcome, everybody. This is Right Now on The New Republic. I’m your host, Perry Bacon. I’ve done a lot of episodes on this show about the media, but most of them have often been very critical—bemoaning layoffs, the decline of local news to some extent, news organizations trying to placate Trump in ways that worry me. The mergers have been troublesome.
But I’m excited today, because we have a positive story about the news and a positive story about journalism. So I have Steve Sachs. He’s the managing director of The Guardian US. You probably have heard of The Guardian—it’s a well-known British paper, but they actually have a very strong US-focused edition and website that has great news about what’s happening in Washington, what’s happening in the country. So I want to talk about what The Guardian is doing here and what maybe other places can learn from it. Steve, welcome.
Steve Sachs: Thank you, Perry. Great to be here.
Bacon: So let me start from the beginning here, to tell people about the history. The Guardian started having a US operation a couple of decades ago. So talk about how that started and what the goal was initially.
Sachs: Yeah. At The Guardian, we’ve always had an editorial team here. But we started about a little more than 15 years ago saying, “Let’s expand into having an audience here and a business here.” And that was part of a strategy at The Guardian, really especially over the last 10 years, where we expanded in two key ways.
One was expanding outside the UK, and the second is expanding committing to being no-paywall, and then asking our audience to support us. Those were important strategic decisions, and expanding in the US was part of that overall strategy.
Bacon: And so let’s talk about pre-Trump—pre-Trump one, even. So as The Guardian opens in the US, you have staffers in New York and in DC and a little bit elsewhere. How big was the initial operation?
Sachs: We started with a team here. New York, DC, and California were our three main places originally. We were first in northern California. We then moved the bureau to southern California, to LA.
And honestly, Perry, in the first few years—first, say, five or six years—it was tough going. We lost a lot of money. We tried to figure out what our unique value is here, and it took us a while to figure out. And it wasn’t a straight line up. The news here—there’s lots of great players. It’s a crowded market.
And so for The Guardian to come in and figure out what is our value overall—what’s our, in business speak, what’s our unique value proposition—it took us a little while to figure out. And our business model took us a little while to figure out as well.
So we started there, but then really over the past, say, six or seven years, we really started to focus and understand what our opportunity is here. And as a result of that, we have grown significantly. We are now, typically in any given month, between 40 and 50 million uniques on our website and in our app, in total. That makes us bigger than the Wall Street Journal in the US.
And over the past five months, for the first time, we now have more page views and more unique visitors in the US than the Washington Post does. We have grown significantly as a result of the work that we’ve done. I could talk a little bit more about what exactly we did, but—
Bacon: We’ll come back to that.
Sachs: The headline is that we’re doing well, and more and more Americans are coming to us as their first choice for all kinds of news and journalism.
Bacon: Let me jump back. The initial goal—why did The Guardian decide to have more staff in the US? What was the initial impetus to start a US edition, or really focus on the US in the first place? Was it part of a worldwide expansion, or was there a specific need you all felt back in 2007?
Sachs: Yeah. So what happened was, 10 years ago—a little bit more than 10 years ago—we were losing a lot of money at The Guardian globally.
And people forget, with the great success of The New York Times—and I have so much respect for what they’ve done—people forget also that 15 years ago, The New York Times was really financially not on strong footing overall. They had to take a loan from a Mexican billionaire, a high-interest loan, in order to really help them shore up their financials.
The Guardian was similar. We were losing about £100 million a year. So that’s about, in today’s dollars, about $135 million. And we only had £700 million in an endowment. So that means we basically had seven years to live.
So what did we do? We decided that—at the time, we were the seventh-largest newspaper in the UK. And we decided that in order to change our economics and to also focus on a broader mission, we would target becoming one of the largest news organizations globally. And the US expansion was an important part of that.
The headline on that is that we are now, in 2026, the fifth-largest news organization globally by audience.
Bacon: CNN, New York Times, Guardian.
Sachs: So we have achieved our goal. New York Times, CNN, BBC, Guardian. So we’ve grown from the seventh-largest news organization in the UK to the fifth-largest news organization globally by audience.
We’ve also changed our economics. So 10 years ago, only 8 percent of our revenue was from outside the UK. Now it’s over 40 percent—it’s 41 percent of our revenue from outside the UK. And so just in 10 years, we successfully changed that. We are also now operating very well financially. And so that big loss that we had, we’ve changed as well.
Bacon: So I’m a journalist—I want to talk about journalism and the stories themselves for a little bit right now. What I found was, in 2017, during that first Trump period, the reason I started reading The Guardian more was, one, I liked the perspective that was international. It wasn’t so grounded in the US, and it helped me see the world a little bit broader, the way you all covered it.
And two, I felt like there was a little more directness about what Trump was doing. Sometimes I worried that NPR, The Times, The Post would do what I think of as a sort of both sides, and not honestly say what he was actually doing and the alarming radicalism. But how do you see that? What was the—how did the Trump era affect what you all did when he was first in office?
Sachs: It’s really interesting to hear what you found valuable for us back in 2017. I would summarize what you said as: we have more of a global perspective.
Whereas many news organizations in the US have more of an American filter. And also what you said was, we can report as is—so that’s really more of an independent view. And that’s exactly right.
A few years ago—when Betsy Reed, our editor, and I started, we both started three and a half years ago, within about a month of each other—one of the first things we did is we wanted to understand what our value proposition is in the US. And there was a lot of debate at the time about what it might be.
So we commissioned research. We did very sophisticated quantitative research with over 3,000 people in the US. They all took a 45-minute in-depth survey. And we did it—those 3,000 people represent that there are about 200 million people in the US who come to digital news every month.
And we wanted to understand what was The Guardian’s value proposition to those 200 million people, and clarify it for us and for the team overall. And the answer is—you got two of the three right. You figured it out in 2017. We didn’t figure it out until 2024.
The answer is that people come to us for the combination of global perspective, independent, and the other important one is no paywall.
Global, independent, and free is what’s unique about us. No one else in the US is doing that. So we are focused on that overall, and that helps us—whether it is what’s happening in DC, or what’s happening in climate, or what’s happening in soccer. Soccer—the World Cup, which is going on right now, or as my colleagues in the UK would call it, football.
There are all kinds of stories that you want to be able to report for an audience that’s looking for a broader global perspective, and independent—not held to, not having the conflicts of a corporate structure that has many different goals, or a billionaire owner that may have personal interests. And we make it all available on our site without any cost.
We then ask people to support us, which we’re very successful in doing. But that’s what we did back then, and even more, that’s what we do now: global perspective that’s independent, without cost, that’s free.
Bacon: Let me probe with all three of those ideas. Let me start with the paywall. The news industry—it was probably a mistake to give everything away for free at the beginning of the internet.
But that said, now when I do my stories and try to look for links and look for facts, I can’t read anything, because everything is behind a paywall now. I really love journalism. I can’t subscribe to every newspaper in every state, and the paywalls are very intense right now. My worry is a lot of the best-quality news—Wall Street Journal, Reuters, Bloomberg—is all behind a paywall.
So tell me—I understand the virtue in having a paywall, but how does that work economically for you all? How do you make money? Just the core question. Everyone wants to have more access, but how do we make that work financially?
Sachs: Yeah. You’re exactly right that, especially even more so over the past couple of years—
When CNN has started a paywall. The BBC has started a paywall in the US. Others have tightened their paywall and made it—you get less for free before you hit the paywall.
Part of it is our mission. So let me tell you a little bit about it, and then I’ll circle back to the exact part of what you were talking about—how we make the economics work. But part of it is our mission, and it’s a mission that comes from the way we are owned and operated.
So The Guardian is owned by a trust in the UK, and the trust has only one mandate, which is to secure the financial and editorial independence of The Guardian in perpetuity. Effectively—
Bacon: And the trust is not run by one person or one family?
Sachs: No, it’s not.
Bacon: OK, that’s important to say.
Sachs: It’s not. It is effectively a nonprofit. We are effectively a nonprofit organization. If we were headquartered in the US, we would reincorporate as a 501(c)(3). There’s no such thing as a 501(c)(3), of course, in the UK, but that’s effectively what we are. They operate us for mission. They operate us for longevity. We have a very large endowment, like a nonprofit news organization or a nonprofit here would have. It’s actually—we have a billion and we have almost a two-billion-pound—sorry, two-billion-dollar—one-and-a-half-billion-pound, two-billion-dollar, approximately, endowment.
And what it does is, that allows us to do the things that we’ve talked about. It allows us to operate independently, because we are—the board, just like ProPublica here has a board. We are like ProPublica, where we have a board that then operates us, governs us in a way that we are reporting and building and being sustainable for the long term. And it does not get involved in journalistic decisions overall.
So the fact that we don’t have a paywall is part of our overall mission to make high-quality journalism, like the other news organizations that you named. The Guardian also has over 1,000 journalists globally now. So we have actually grown. We’re one of the only news organizations that has grown our newsroom over the past few years. In fact, in the US, when I started, we had about 75 journalists. In the US right now, we have 150.
So we’ve doubled in the last three years. So we’re one of the few news organizations in the US that’s actually growing our newsroom too. And the reason why we can do it is, we don’t have to report earnings quarterly. We don’t even report them—we report them voluntarily, publicly.
We can draw down a small amount off of our endowment like a nonprofit would here. But we use that to invest for the future. So all the investment that we’ve done in the US is as a result of being able to draw down a couple of percent off of our endowment every year. And that endowment is still growing, because we’re so conservatively drawing down on it.
So the big picture on it is that The Guardian is different and has an advantage in serving an audience because of the way we’re set up, and because of the way we’re now funded and we’re in a strong financial position.
So then what does that translate into? If we’re going to make all our information available for free on our website, how do we actually make money then? And the answer is that 10 years ago, we started what we call a reader revenue program. It actually—we should really rename it now, because we’re much more than reading. It’s really an audience revenue or supporter revenue program. And when people come, we ask them to support us, in much the same way that, say, NPR asks people to support. We’ve become very good at it.
And in the US, about two-thirds of our revenue—so last year we broke $80 million of revenue in the US. About two-thirds of that comes from voluntary contributions that people don’t have to make, but they do. So that’s $58 million last year. Over 700,000 people in the US and Canada combined made a contribution. About 500,000 of those are actually on a recurring basis, either every month or every year, automatically on a credit card.
And two-thirds of our revenue in the US—$58 million last year and growing, that was up 35 percent, actually, the real revenue was up 35 percent last year versus the year before, so we’re growing—is as a result of people coming to our site or our app and really appreciating what’s there and saying, You know what? This is a different perspective, and I really appreciate it, and it’s made available for free, and I’m going to support it.
Bacon: Make sure I’m understanding this right. So half a million people are contributing to The Guardian in the US, even though they could get it for free. That’s an important statistic.
Sachs: It’s even more than that. It’s 700,000. And the way we look at it is US and Canada—we call it North America, so US and Canada, correctly. But the vast majority is US. Over 700,000 people did that. Of that, 500,000 are on a recurring basis—effectively a subscription.
The other 200,000 made a one-time contribution. And so we’ve got 700,000 people in the US and Canada, North America, that are contributing even though they don’t have to, because they really appreciate what it is that we do and find it really valuable.
Bacon: And I would say, as a person in that group, part of what I find valuable is other people can read the stories. I can send the story to someone, and they can read it without me having to do a bunch of gymnastics and passwords.
Sachs: That’s right. That’s a very important thing. And so there’s that benefit. We do a lot of research to understand, why is it? Why do people support us? And really interestingly, more than half the people that support us aren’t coming regularly. We track how often somebody comes to our site or our app.
Do they come every day? Do they come a couple times a week? Do they come once every 30 days? Have we not seen them in the past 30 days? What’s really interesting is, of the 700,000 people in the US that made a contribution in the last year, over half of them come less than once a month. So you would say, Why are they making a contribution then? They’re not actually coming.
And the answer is—we do a lot of research on this—the answer is that, as there are fewer and fewer news organizations that can report independently, that have the kind of global perspective we have and make the information available for free, they appreciate that and want to support that, even if they’re not coming.
Because it’s not just that they can share with others, it’s also they feel it’s important to have independent journalism in the US that is well-funded, and they’re willing to kick in 50 bucks, or 15 dollars a month, or whatever it is they can afford, in order to have The Guardian exist and be strong and growing.
So it’s really counterintuitive that somebody would give us 15 dollars a month when they don’t come to our site or they don’t come to our app, but they do.
Bacon: That’s amazing. I didn’t realize that.
Sachs: They do that because of the value that we have overall and the importance of that that people feel, for America and the world.
Bacon: Let me drill in on independent. So that’s a tricky word, in that everybody who works at The Guardian says, “We’re independent.” And I perceive you all as being more liberal—not in a high-taxes way, but in a sort of for-freedom, for-equality way. There are some values. So how do you see your values?
My guess is a lot of those 700,000 people, most of them voted for Harris—I don’t know if you want to say that or not. But when you say independent, you mean not owned by a billionaire. So what are the values of The Guardian? Let me put it that way, in terms of journalism. What are the values of The Guardian?
Sachs: Yeah. Independent is a really important one. And what we mean by independent is, in our news report, we are reporting the facts.
And there’s not—as you mentioned—there’s not a both-sides to it that comes into our report. Our opinion—we do opinion, of course. Our opinion is left of center, for sure. We’ve got great opinion writers—Robert Reich and Margaret Sullivan and others, Betty Hassan, who contribute. And our opinion’s left of center, but our news report is independent and is reporting facts without a bias to it.
Bacon: And you want Republicans reading—you want everybody to read it.
Sachs: Not only do we want—we look, sometimes we look at Democrat versus Republican, but what we find more helpful is asking people how they define themselves on a liberal-versus-conservative scale.
And so when we look at our audience and ask them to define themselves as either very liberal, moderate, conservative, or very conservative—when we look at that, only about 40 percent of people define themselves as either liberal or very liberal.
Another 35 percent define themselves as moderate. And 25 percent define themselves as conservative or very conservative.
Bacon: I would not have guessed it. That’s interesting. I’m glad you told me that. That’s good to know.
Sachs: So that, by the way, is different in the US than it is in other parts of the world. Because people didn’t grow up with The Guardian here. In the UK, people grew up with it and have a very clear view of what it is. Here, people are still discovering it. And so they come and they see our news report, and they see us being global, independent, and free.
And so they don’t read into it, Yeah, this is X. This is either very conservative, very liberal, whatever it is. And so we get a broader audience because of that. And that is something that we’re really thrilled about, because there’s so much polarization in the US when it comes to media, and so we would like to be able to reach a broader audience overall. It’s just part of our mission.
Bacon: Are the readers you’re getting people who also read the Times and NPR or CNN? Are they people who don’t? Are you a lot of people’s second read, or their first—maybe they also have a second read? I’m not trying to diminish you. But is it people who read a lot of media, or people who just read one thing? That’s what I’m asking.
Sachs: It’s a great question. The same research I was just referring to, where we figured out our value proposition, and we also asked about how people self-define, liberal versus conservative—we asked about this question because we always had this question of second read versus first read. And it turns out that it’s really interesting.
The whole idea of a first read and second read is actually an outdated idea. It’s from an idea of when a newspaper was thrown up on your driveway, and then you would go out and get it, or dropped off if you’re in an apartment in New York, dropped off at your front door or the front desk.
People now read—or watch or listen—really broadly, because they come to your podcast, and they come to The Guardian, and they go to The New York Times, and they might go to Axios, et cetera. And so when you look at what The Guardian is, we are part of the mix, in the same way that others are as well.
Most people—even when you look at something like CNN or The New York Times—most people would say, Oh, that could be a first, the first thing they turn to. It turns out that, based off of our research, less than 20 percent of the people that, say, go to the New York Times consider it their primary read or view of the world.
Because you’re discovering in your social feed, or you’re getting a newsletter or whatever, so you’re pretty broad here, and we’re now part of that mix as well—which is part of the advantage that we’ve had here, and why it is that we’ve been able to grow our audience while others are not growing their audience. A lot of news organizations have really had their audiences shrink in the last five years. And so it actually is an advantage that people are sampling so much, because they might discover us on Apple News.
And they may not have known about us before that. And then they discover us through that.
Bacon: Global is the third word you use. I think you might be using the word “global” meaning you all are based in Britain, you cover the world a lot. The other reason I think of you all as global being different is that—and I’m not trying to throw shade—when I read a story in the Journal, The New York Times, Axios about politics, it often reflects a DC-centric view of how politics works. And I read you all’s stories, and it’s, Oh, the broader picture. Sometimes the stories are like, sources close to say this.
And you all’s stories tend to be more, Here’s where this issue works, here’s how this thing is working. It’s written so my mom, my brother, and everybody else I know can read the story without having to need a translator. And I think that’s helpful—the domestic stories are written for everybody as opposed to written for the inside-DC crowd. That’s what I perceive. And I think that comes from also not being based in the US.
Sachs: It’s a really—you’re exactly right about that. So when I talk about global, what our audience says, and what we have adopted as part of our value proposition, is global perspective.
Bacon: Global perspective. OK.
Sachs: So what does global perspective mean? It means two things. Number one, it means that we do cover the world, because we now have over 1,000 journalists globally, of which a couple hundred—by the end of this year, a couple hundred—will be in the US. It means more than 800 in other parts of the world. That means that we just have really great coverage of what’s happening all over the world in ways that other news organizations don’t.
And so that is part of what people come to us for. About half of the stories that Americans read or listen to at The Guardian, about half in any given day or month, are created outside the US.
But the part that you’re focused on is exactly right, which is the other side of global perspective—and that is, when we’re covering the US, we cover it with what people call an outside perspective. And that is valuable, because what it means is two things. Number one, when we cover a story that others do also, we cover it with a different view. And number two, we frequently cover stories that others don’t.
So let me give you an example on the first one. Last month we published a series called The Slow Lane, which looks at how Americans’ love of cars caused our public transportation system to fall way behind other global cities or other countries. So if you look at Sydney or Barcelona or Hong Kong—we cover public transportation here with an outside view, more of a global view, while covering what’s happening in the US. That’s an example of something that’s different as well.
When we cover gun violence, or our broken healthcare system, or the death penalty, we cover them not as impossible-to-solve problems—because they’re not—but rather as issues that could be addressed if Americans look beyond their borders at how other countries have tackled them better. And I think that’s part of what you’re talking about, the unique value that you get from The Guardian, and that’s what our audience does too.
Bacon: So last question, just because of who I am and where I’ve come from. I worked at The Washington Post until about a year ago. Jeff Bezos wanted the opinion section to move to the right, and so it ended up making more sense to work at The New Republic now, and I’ve had a great opportunity here.
But I wanted to ask you—did the Washington Post and the LA Times decisions to cancel endorsements and signal a different kind of direction, and maybe even CBS—have some of those changes at other places... I know you all have had a big audience growth. Is some of that driven from those other places maybe making mistakes, or is that more organic? Talk about how the other media’s moves have affected what you all are doing.
Sachs: Yeah. I don’t want to comment on specific companies or people, but I can say that more and more people are discovering The Guardian as they’re looking for other alternatives.
And The Post does some great journalism.
Bacon: I agree. Oh, yes.
Sachs: They do some fantastic journalism. They have a much smaller team than they used to.
But I have a lot of respect for the journalism they do. And others as well. The news audience is very tuned in.
And as decisions are made, they say, I really want to look at other options. And over the past few years, more people have looked around, and we’ve benefited as a result. We’ve seen our audience grow. So for example, as I said, the Washington Post—a year ago we were smaller than The Washington Post in audience, in uniques and in page views on the site. Now we’re bigger.
And that’s because we’ve grown. They’ve shrunk as well. And they do great journalism, but people are making choices.
One thing that’s interesting about The Guardian also, and this points to opportunity in the US, is that we think there’s a lot more opportunity to grow here. So we’re at 40 to 50 million uniques a month now. But also, in our research, only about 59 percent of people in the US who use digital news have ever heard of The Guardian. That number in the UK is 85 percent.
Bacon: And I’m sure The Washington Post number’s up in the 80s or something like this—much higher.
Sachs: Exactly.
Bacon: Yeah, you would assume.
Sachs: And so there’s another 20-plus points of people in the US that still have never heard of us. That will help us as they continue to look around, as we continue to grow what we do. We’ve recently launched new kinds of coverage. We’ve invested heavily in soccer and covering soccer in the US for the World Cup, and so we’ve had huge audiences for that over the past few weeks.
We’ve increased our DC team. We used to do mostly breaking news. We now do enterprise and investigations out of DC also. As we have more for people to discover, and as people look around, I think The Guardian will continue to do well in the US. And others do great work also. I think the audience is frequently now kind of saying, Let me see what else is out there.
Bacon: Last question. I worry about this Trump bump, because you saw from 2017 to 2020, news organizations had a big audience, then it declined. How are you going to make sure you sustain this audience and this growth? Because Trump’s not going to be president anymore after two years or so, obviously. So how do you make sure you keep this audience and keep the growth and keep the momentum going after that?
Sachs: Yeah. There’s no doubt that we’ve had some wind in our sails over the past 18 months. People are coming to us for much more than Trump. So people are coming to us for—we’re among the best in the world in covering climate, one of the most important, maybe the defining issue of our time. People come for health-related, health-equity-related issues.
But what we’re doing is, we are investing heavily outside of hard news, so that when people come, and when the news cycle is less intense than what it is, people know and come to us for other areas. So for example, I mentioned soccer. We now have one of the largest teams in the US covering soccer, plus all the people we have in the UK covering soccer. And soccer has become much more popular in the US, and so even after the World Cup’s over, people are going to be wanting to come to that. They’ll come to The Guardian for that.
We started a heavily researched reviews site called The Filter—our version of consumer journalism, doing reviews like, say, Wirecutter does, or Strategist, or others. We started that a year ago. That’s doing really well. We launched wellness coverage a couple of years ago, with what we call, which is a realistic view on wellness. So much of wellness is really about perfection. That’s not about us at all.
So we’re investing heavily outside of hard news, so that both when people come, there’s more to go to, and also when the news cycle is less frenetic, people will continue to come to us for other reasons.
Bacon: And with that, Steve Sachs—I love the idea of global, independent, and free. Those are three great words to use. Steve Sachs is the managing director for The Guardian US. I highly recommend The Guardian US as a product. If you’re reading the Times and the Post, CNN—you should definitely add The Guardian to your reading list if you haven’t already. Obviously, read The New Republic too, but The Guardian is doing some really great work. So Steve, congrats on that, and thank you for joining me.
Sachs: Perry, thanks so much. I really enjoyed it.
Bacon: Good to see you. Bye-bye.
