I saw a talk by a product manager at the Guardian, and as I understand it, that transformation was a reaction to declining print sales, shaky ad revenue, the rise of Facebook & Google, the success of sites like Buzzfeed & Vox, etc. They've been losing money for a long time and have been slashing costs as much as they can, but that doesn't make a business sustainable.

Nowadays, most people will get to a news article from a friend sharing it on facebook, or from reddit or hacker news, etc, not the Guardian homepage, and that means clickbait pays the bills.

I say let them crash. Let them ALL crash. We don't need no stinking news!

Certainly if that's what they call news and that's how they want to deliver it.

The Guardian has gone, in Claire Graves' Spiral Dynamics terms, gone FS centric: basically treating truth as context dependent and thus completely relative. This makes for unreadable & highly subjective and sarcastic reading without much point beyond the authors own self interest in writing (and presumably making a living from it..).

It's gotten to stage where I go straight to the comments on HN rather than to the story when I see that the source is the Gaurdian. You know it's going to be some ill informed opinion piece rather than any actual journalism. Like you, I used to buy the physical paper back in the day - and felt the paper represented a continuation of the institution so admired by Orwell. I'm not sure which is more depressing - that it's so rubbish now or that it's become so commercially successful with its current approach to content.

> become so commercially successful

Wut? They're bleeding money like a stuck pig.

I agree very much, and think that a lot of the problem comes from the fact that as a society, we are not taught enough about how to think (and especially read) critically. In combination with floods of data coming in 24/7, people's compasses start getting out of whack, and online journalism becomes a marketer's dream. I'm guilty of it too, even though I try to make a conscious effort to pick my sources more carefully now.

It is really sad about The Guardian. But truth be told, one only needs two or three news sources. They are no longer one of mine.

> one only needs two or three news sources.

But society as a whole needs more. If the available pool of profitable resources for quality journalism keeps getting smaller, then a) the number of stories that fall through the cracks get larger, b) the surface area for corruption gets smaller: now all I need is to influence one editor/journalist to get story x pulled.

That is a valid and excellent point. Shame on me for taking a narrow perspective. But how can I as an individual support more than a few new publications?

off-topic, but the guardian crossword went back to being free a while ago (and there was much rejoicing).

I also avoid the crossword because I'm just terrible at it, but that's another story