Rupert Murdoch has started putting his newspaper sites behind pay walls. As predicted, this has had a wonderful effect: traffic to the sites has halved. People confronted by the registration page head either to the Telegraph (boo) or the Guardian (qualified yay).
It's early days, but this isn't going to be good for News International. They already make a whacking loss on The Times, and without readers, their advertising rates will drop, with no compensation by subscriptions. Result: a better informed public.
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Guardian News and Media lost £36.8m in 2008-9, around £100,000 per day. They made tens of journalists redundant this year, that's presumably why they've given up on investigative journalism and have low-rate fashion writers covering most stories. A decent newspaper needs to charge to sustain the quality but it's too late for the Guardian. I'd rather give my subscription to the FT online, which has retained some decent journalists and has much better coverage of international news.
I sort of share your concerns about the Guardian. There's far too much fashion'n'celebrity crap, but they do still run good investigative pieces, such as the tax avoidance series last year. I'm not sure it's too late, but they are struggling.
As to the FT: I've always admired the quality of the news journalism - outstanding. But you can't really criticise the Guardian for froth when the FT has a whole magazine called 'How To Spend It'. The FT's in financial trouble too. Finally, the Guardian's far too rightwing for my taste, and the FT is even further right, though obviously not as loony as the Mail, Telegraph and Express. The FT is, I suppose, rightwing on economics, whereas the others aren't bright enough to have a coherent economic view and specialise in conservative social politics.
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