The Guardian needed a new US headquarters.
It was the morning of February 23, and staffers gathered at the company’s office in lower Manhattan, an immense space that the British newspaper once hoped would be home to a 300-person-strong US digital arm.
Now the company — years ago a burgeoning news outlet with a shiny Pulitzer Prize and editorial ambitions to take on the titans of American journalism on their own turf — was in stark cost-cutting mode. In September 2016, Guardian US announced it was slashing 30% of its workforce.
The retrenchment necessitated a change of scenery, too. At the meeting, Guardian US editor Lee Glendinning announced that the company had signed a lease agreement to move to a smaller Brooklyn office.
It was a room full of journalists, so the questions flew. Where? What’s the address? According to multiple people at the meeting, one reporter remarked that Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior White House adviser, owned some buildings in Brooklyn. Was this one of them?
A rattled Glendinning said sharply that it wasn’t, according to the attendees. Reporters pulled up news articles, raising their phones to show that it was indeed property owned by Kushner, who divested some of his family real estate empire’s holdings to join the White House.
“You see the cerebral cortexes trying to process this information,” one reporter present told BuzzFeed News.
The newsroom was incredulous. Some wondered if the Guardian expected sources to feel secure communicating with reporters inside a Kushner building.
A month later, Glendinning announced a change of plans: Guardian US would instead relocate to Midtown Manhattan, a worse commute for many of its Brooklyn-based journalists but to a building without a White House connection. Interim Guardian US CEO Evelyn Webster told staff that the blunder cost the company about $250,000 — a figure that, according to a person familiar with the company’s finances, reflected the loss of expected cost savings from the original move. (The company has denied the number.) Days later, Guardian US announced a new round of cost cuts — another 20%.
The newsroom was incredulous. Some wondered if the Guardian expected sources to feel secure communicating with reporters inside a Kushner building.
In the newsroom, which has dwindled to about 45 people, the Kushner oversight was viewed as dark comedy, a telling coda capping years of mismanagement, tensions between Brits and Americans, poisonous internal politicking, poor business decisions amid a tough advertising market, and a failure to assert itself as the voice of the new American political left.
The New York Times and the Washington Post, with which the Guardian has hoped to compete, have thrived recently, racking up huge national security scoops, new paying subscribers, and a firm sense of place in a chaotic media environment. But Guardian US, many insiders believe, missed its core political opportunity in 2016 to align itself with the Bernie Sanders insurgency in the way its British parent paper has long been linked with the UK Labour left.
Glendinning lost some US employees' confidence not just over editorial matters, but also in the wake of a sexual harassment allegation against her former top lieutenant, Matt Sullivan (an allegation he denies).
To hear management tell it, the US operation is swimming against tough financial tides, with the Guardian’s global finances in repair mode and the US display ad market going sideways. This narrative, an investigation into the company reveals, is incomplete. Conversations with more than 20 current and former employees, internal documents, and financial figures paint a different picture — one of overspending and missed opportunities by those currently in power, particularly Guardian editor Katharine Viner, global CEO David Pemsel, and Glendinning. The thirst for global expansion was so strong, in fact, that the Guardian’s former US CEO says he was pressured to make unattainable business projections to fuel the growth.
Some former staffers spoke on the condition of anonymity for this story because they signed nondisparagement agreements when leaving the Guardian, while current staffers were granted anonymity because they are not authorized to speak about the company.
All of this — the money, the dissatisfied and reduced staff, the failure to compete — puts Guardian US on the verge of being a flameout as a US-based news operation, reduced to a glorified foreign bureau for the UK paper.
Through a Guardian spokesperson, Viner, Pemsel, and Webster declined to comment for this story. In a statement, Glendinning said, “We will keep reporting deeply and fearlessly in the US and continue to bring our outsider perspective at this critical time.”
The US operation is now struggling to find its identity beyond filling the Trump-sized hole in the Guardian’s UK print edition every day. And in recent weeks, Glendinning has introduced a confusing motto and guiding philosophy that Guardian US journalists say they find excruciating: “Covering America for the world, including Americans.”
Whether Guardian US was doomed from the start depends on whom you ask, but the news outlet did have an early glory period.
The project launched in 2011 under the editorship of Janine Gibson, an ally to then-editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger. (Gibson, now editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed UK, declined to comment for this story.) The effort was something of a reboot of Guardian America, the paper’s existing news brand in the US market, where it derived a surprising amount of traffic. When the Guardian arrived, the New York media world was already familiar with its brand of liberal, crusading reporting on topics like WikiLeaks and the News Corp phone hacking scandal. According to Rusbridger, planting a new flag in the US with aplomb was mostly a business impulse.
“There was a feeling on the commercial side that the big money was in America in terms of advertising,” Rusbridger told BuzzFeed News. “If we could build up a significant presence in America, you would have editorial ambition and commercial rewards.”
The thought was that experienced editors who knew the Guardian’s sensibilities should come over from London and then hire some American underlings who understood the local media landscape. Coverage was intended for an American audience — not, in the more classic foreign bureau tradition, a British audience wondering what’s happening in America. The company conceived of Guardian US initially as a lean operation that would focus on subjects where Guardian reporters could distinguish the brand’s prestige.
“We did not feel we could go into America and beat the New York Times and Washington Post on their own patch,” Rusbridger said. “There could be an opportunity in covering a few beats really well and in a different voice.”
“We can only justify being here if we were doing shit nobody else was doing.”
While much of the media balked at Occupy Wall Street, Guardian US dug in on the story, live-blogging the event on a daily basis. The outlet was also among a group of digital newsrooms experimenting with interactive journalism, like a project in 2012 visualizing gay rights across the 50 states. A former employee described the Guardian US editorial ethos: “We can only justify being here if we were doing shit nobody else was doing.”
Then came Edward Snowden.
In the summer of 2013, the Guardian became the central publisher in the world when Glenn Greenwald, Ewen MacAskill, documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras, and other Guardian journalists began publishing astounding stories based on documents from Snowden, who had leaked thousands of classified NSA documents.
The Snowden period consumed a portion of the Guardian US staff. But some felt on the outskirts, and Gibson, who had previously been a hands-on presence across the newsroom, disappeared frequently to focus on the story. The Guardian shared in a Pulitzer Prize for public service with the Washington Post, cementing its status. But as things were winding down, the post-Snowden hangover hit hard.
“We were basking in the glory of winning a Pulitzer,” said a former staffer. “It was a bit like, 'Oh shit, what are we going to do after this?'”
Meanwhile, the business side was still struggling to sell American advertisers on what the Guardian was exactly as it navigated the implications of its editorial success. “While Snowden put us on the map, it makes corporate clients very nervous about wanting to get big into the Guardian,” according to a former executive.
As the US newsroom tried to determine what the Guardian would do next — how they could leverage the notoriety that Snowden had brought the brand — the leadership changed. In March 2014, shortly before the Pulitzer victory, Gibson and her deputy Stuart Millar, who also now works at BuzzFeed UK, were summoned back to London to resuscitate the paper’s digital efforts; Viner relocated from running Guardian Australia to take over in the US.
Staffers quickly took to Viner, a dynamic, idea-generating editor who was committed to making a big impression in America, as she had done in Australia.
“She does her fucking homework, really gets stuck in, and she impresses everyone,” one former Guardian US journalist said. “She was a really good operator and gave a lot of people confidence. We were neglected for a while with Snowden.”
Instead of the emphasis of a handful of core topics, Viner expanded aggressively into new areas of coverage like theater, arts, and sports. Gone was a narrow focus on a few winnable topics like national security. Guardian US was to compete with the New York Times, MSNBC, and the Washington Post on every story and beat. It would cover all the news of the day. And it would grow, grow, grow.
“All of a sudden we tripled in size,” said a former employee. “We were like, ‘Holy shit.’”
Amid the search for a different identity in the United States, the hunt for web traffic and advertising dollars escalated. Editors were instructed to more closely monitor what search terms were surfacing in Google. A new ethos, according to one former employee, came to the fore: “We need to play the scale game.”
“All of a sudden we tripled in size. We were like, ‘Holy shit.’”
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