By Giuseppe de Santis
Nationalists will be delighted to know that our campaign aimed to bankrupt The Guardian and The Observer is starting to bring some results.
In fact, recently released figures revealed that The Guardian and The Observer lost £44.2m last year as investment in digital publishing, including iPad, Facebook and Android apps, contributed to a deepening of losses at the national newspapers that could not be offset by double-digit growth in digital revenues.
Alan Rusbridger, editor-in-chief of the titles, said the newspapers would aim to save £7m from editorial expenditure in order to help reduce the deficit, while the publisher will seek between 70 and 100 journalist redundancies from a workforce of about 650 via a reopened voluntary programme.
In a briefing for staff, Rusbridger said the Guardian and Observer – collectively Guardian News & Media (GNM) – "will be smaller" and that the newspapers "will do less, less of what's called commodity journalism, so that we can do more on our core purpose and the type of journalism that we're here to do".
The Guardian sold 211,511 copies a day in June, the last month for which figures are available, down 10.7% on the year on a like-for-like basis, while the Observer sold 243,946, a reduction of 10%. Print advertising shrunk 4%, at £43.7m.
However there is an interesting aspect about those voluntary redundancies.
Apparently The Guardian has an agreement with the National Union of Journalists stating that even one forced layoff would trigger an immediate strike ballot.
This is not really surprising as it reflects The Guardian's political views but the problem is that with voluntary redundancies, The Guardian will lose people who are in a good position to get jobs elsewhere and not the people that it really needs to lose.
This is important because, by losing the best people, both The Guardian and The Observer will accelerate their decline and go bankrupt sooner rather than later and when this happens it will spell trouble for several hundreds of useless Marxists who are nowhere to go as they are unemployable.
For that reason it's important to carry on boycotting the two rags together with Auto Trader, the magazine that with its profits keeps the two titles alive.
Everybody can do his bit to achieve this goal, because together we can.
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