The Guardian US team had more reason than most to feel disconsolate after Donald Trump‘s surprisingly emphatic US election victory.

The title has, perhaps more than any other mainstream US newsbrand, declared its opposition to Trump and what he stands for.

Asked how she set about rallying the team after the election on 5 November, Guardian US editor Betsy Reed said: “I’m really not the kind of person who’s going to charge in there and give a pep talk at a moment when everyone is really exhausted and depressed.

“So instead we had a newsroom meeting that was more sombre and allowed people to express how they’re feeling about this moment…

“Then we have to make sure people know why our mission is still really vital and important and unique and why our jobs are so important in this moment.”

Reed helped raise around $2m in reader revenue for The Guardian with just a few minutes’ work after she sent out a five-paragraph email to its millions of newsletter subscribers on 26 October noting the brand’s leader column opposing Trump.

She contrasted The Guardian’s position (that Trump’s “history of dishonesty, hypocrisy and greed makes him wholly unfit for the office”) with that of The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, which both stayed neutral. Noting the editorial independence of The Guardian, Reed said in her email that both those rival titles “have billionaire owners who could face retaliation in a Trump presidency”.

Reed is keen to emphasise that years of work from the whole Guardian US team has gone into building various email newsletters which enable it to reach millions of readers with funding pleas.

The Guardian US has 11 email newsletters in total, with Fighting Back (the opinion desk’s response to a Trump victory) the most recent launch.

The Guardian US is now hoping to raise $4m in total of additional reader revenue by the end of the year.

But who is the UK-owned Guardian to tell US voters what to do, and does its opposition to their democratically-elected leader not irk some readers?

“We haven’t had that feedback,” Reed responds. “And the reason for that is we are now more global and more American. I’m American, my commercial partner is American and our newsroom is at least half American journalists. I don’t think we are perceived as a foreign entity at this point because we’ve put down real roots in America.”

Guardian America launched in 2007 with an eight-strong team based in Washington and an estimated monthly audience in the US of just over 4 million, according to Nielsen.

Today The Guardian US has 160 staff, including 110 in editorial, mainly based in New York but with bureaux in Washington and California. (Around 50 staff were hired in 2013 to get the site ready for election year.)

Reed, who joined The Guardian in 2022 after seven years leading non-profit campaigning US news website The Intercept, says it reaches 47 million unique users per month in the US.

Overall, she says, page views to US-produced content are a 50/50 split between US readers and the rest of the world.

The Guardian US is funded by a combination of reader revenue (donations and subscriptions), advertising and philanthropic donations, which are made via the separate non-profit entity the Guardian.org Foundation. This last category funds specific areas of reporting and saw donations of $3m last year, down from $5m in 2022.

Guardian revenue for North America is available in published accounts dating back to 2019 and shows steady growth until the year to March 2024, when it fell by just over £1m.

North America accounted for £45.3m of Guardian turnover in the year to March 2024 (compared with £167.1m in the UK).

The Guardian made an overall loss of £36.5m in its last financial year, but Reed said the US operation is self-funding.

Asked what makes The Guardian US stand out in a crowded news market, Reed pointed to its more global view, its openness (outside any paywall) and "our liberal values and grounding in progressive principles".

The victory for Trump has been seen by some as a failure for big news organisations like The Guardian, CNN and The New York Times which opposed him.

Is there a danger that journalists effectively played Trump's game in the last election by reporting and amplifying the various outrageous comments he made over the course of the campaign?

"I do think that the outrage cycle is a serious challenge in media, and I don't think it's a simple one, because I think when you have a presidential candidate trafficking in outright fabrications, racist fabrications, for example the charge that Haitian migrants are stealing and eating their neighbours' pets in Springfield, Illinois, I feel like it's incumbent on the media to cover that.

"I think the strategy has to be cover that news story, but also simultaneously pull people away from that and into more substantive stories about what's really going on in the country, how Trump and his policies are disconnected from the real interests and needs of American voters."

[Read more: Polls, trust and video shorts: Lessons for news publishers from US election]

She adds later: "There's been a big loss of this environment where we're all collectively operating from the same set of facts. So, I mean, I think that's a tremendous challenge. There are really terrible repercussions of that for democracy…

"But it also, I think, reinforces the need for fact-based journalism and journalism that is itself accountable to readers."

The Guardian left X (formerly Twitter) earlier this month because, it said, the platform had become toxic under owner Elon Musk.

Press Gazette understands this led to the second biggest day ever for Guardian reader revenue contributions, (beaten only by Reed's election email funding plea).

Reed said Instagram, Youtube, Apple News and email are now the biggest platforms for the title other than the website itself.

Big hits for The Guardian US over the last year have included its new investigation team's revelations about allegations of sexual misconduct against the magician David Copperfield (shortlisted for a British Journalism Award) and an investigation into the cost of US healthcare.

Election exclusives for The Guardian US have included three big stories about the mistreatment of animals by senior right-wing political figures.

In April The Guardian revealed that Republican contender for Vice President Kristi Noem once shot and killed a healthy pet dog (as well as the family goat).

In September, the title revealed that Kevin Roberts (architect of the Project 2025 policy manifesto) boasted to colleagues that he once killed a neighbour's dog with a shovel because it was barking too loudly.

And in October it revealed that the head of the NRA Doug Hamlin was involved in the torture and killing of a cat while at college.

Outside politics, The Guardian US is investing in its coverage of soccer (football in the UK), health and wellness.

Asked what The Guardian US plans are for covering America in the era of Trump Two, Reed says: "We definitely want to double down on areas of success like newsletters, and outside of Trump and politics we want to make sure that we're offering readers a diversity of content and things that give them joy and hope."

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Most news publishers who expressed a preference endorsed Kamala Harris as US president, yet Donald Trump has been returned to office.

The margin of victory for Trump, winning both the electoral college and the popular vote, also surprised many in the media and appeared to be fuelled by a campaign which focused more on courting popular podcasters than it did legacy media.

We asked senior leaders at major US news publishers what the lessons are from the presidential election on connecting with audiences.

The Guardian’s US editor Betsy Reed suggested “so-called outrage cycles” may not deserve as much coverage in future as they did not prove to be deal breakers to voters, but she believes the media did do a “pretty good job” conveying the stakes of the election.

Francesca Barber, executive director of global newsroom strategy at Politico, said trust is gained by “listening, not just opining”.

Geordie Greig, editor of The Independent which has been quickly expanding in the US, said the election should remind the media of the importance of short-form video.

Katie Davies, editor of Dailymail.com, said the election only underscored that Americans are “consuming their news in more ways than ever before”.

BBC News director of digital Naja Nielsen said the election showed it is easy to become over-reliant on polls and “nothing beats boots on the ground”.

And The Hill’s director of audience and social media Sarakshi Rai said “being fair and nonpartisan” will help build trust with audiences and show there is not “some kind of underlying agenda”.

Read on to see each of their answers in full.

‘We need to reconsider reporting of outrage cycles’

Betsy Reed, US editor – The Guardian

“Overall, I actually think the media did a pretty good job reporting on the stakes of this election. But we did make a few mistaken assumptions this time around: that people would turn away from Trump because of his dangerous rhetoric and outrageous statements; and that the enthusiasm we observed at Kamala’s rallies would be sufficient to draw voters out, outweighing very real, well-documented concerns voters had about the economy, inflation, and the party in power.

“To be fair, The Guardian and the media did extensively cover voter dissatisfaction with the economy – in particular in our “Confidence Question” series – but we need to seriously consider how much reporting resources we devote to so-called outrage cycles moving forward, when it’s clear those things aren’t ultimately decisive to undecided voters.”

Trust ‘means listening, not just opining’

Francesca Barber, executive director of global newsroom strategy at Politico

“The way people are consuming media and information is changing rapidly – this election cycle saw the power of podcasts and loyalty with relatable, trusted voices amongst specific audiences. Think Call Her Daddy and Joe Rogan as major interview moments for both Trump and Harris.

“Trust is important here: it means listening, not just opining. It means having a direct relationship to audiences in the formats they are consuming (e.g. video, audio, shareable direct messages). And it means being clear who your audience is and building expectations and habit throughout the year, so that during an election cycle, they come to you.

“At Politico, our audience relies on our voice and authority to inform their daily professional lives. They rely on our geographic breadth to contextualize major global moments and our depth of reporting in each local market, to highlight the shifting policy and power dynamics beyond the horse race of an election.

“Now, we must continue to be thoughtful and creative with how and when we’re reaching our readers as we continue to keep up with the changing consumption and technological habits of our readers.”

‘Short-form video is key’

Geordie Greig, editor of The Independent

“The US election showed that, despite Trump’s attacks against many media companies, serious, independent journalism cuts through and still connects, as demonstrated by our record month in the US in September, in which we became the number one British brand in America.

“While we often think of America as being polarised, the exit polling also demonstrated just how many voters see themselves as independent. So there’s clearly a significant appetite for unbiased, authoritative news, and an opportunity for trusted brands to deliver this.

“Readers across the political spectrum seem increasingly to distrust what candidates are saying, but they still want to feel that they know the facts about the issues.

“More broadly, this election showed news brands what we already know. Audiences don’t consume news in the same way they did even ten years ago. Short-form video is key, and you need to meet audiences where they are. That’s why we stepped Independent TV into a higher gear and renewed our focus on platforms like TikTok.

“It remains to be seen whether the industry will experience a second ‘Trump bump,’ but all we can do is continue reporting, and finding our audience wherever they consume news. What we do is on the tin: we will stay independent.”

Audience wants ‘hard facts and unbiased news coverage’

Sarakshi Rai, director of audience and social media – The Hill

“The Hill paid close attention to what our audience wanted from political media outlets this election cycle – hard facts and unbiased news coverage along with data and in-depth analysis. The media needs to embrace being fair and nonpartisan in order to build trust with readers of all political stripes and convince them that there’s not some kind of underlying agenda to their coverage.

“There’s no denying that trust in media outlets has been low this election cycle and at The Hill we followed an editorial policy of not telling our readers what to think but allowing them to understand the facts and make up their own minds. It’s essential that news organisations reach audiences where they are at, not force them to meet them where they want them to be with their coverage that might skew one way or another.

“At The Hill we met our audience exactly where they were, whether it was with our video coverage, data analysis or editorial coverage. It’s not a one size fits all approach, and we made sure we had elements that people wanted from media outlets. Our partnership with Decision Desk also drove audience interest with a data and facts-first approach with polling aggregate numbers throughout the election cycle as well as a forecasting model and live election results.

“And as we looked deeper at the numbers, the results speak for themselves between Election Day and the day after – we not only gave our audiences what they wanted but grew it. TheHill.com saw 9.44 million unique visitors, over 18.34 million page views and 3.43 million video starts on the site.”

‘Americans are consuming their news in more ways than ever before’

Katie Davies, editor-in-chief – Dailymail.com

Dailymail.com saw record levels of traffic on election day, one of its highest-performing days in the US to date, and direct homepage traffic was the highest it had been for two years.

Press Gazette understands Daily Mail Tiktok videos were viewed a record 6.5 billion times in October and 5.3 billion times in September, and its election coverage on the platform received 427 million video views and led to almost 400,000 new followers.

The brand worked with polling firm JL Partners which projected a 287-251 win for Trump, which turned out to be closer to his actual 312 – 226 win than many other pollsters.

Katie Davies said: “This election cycle underscores the fact that Americans, now more than ever, are consuming their news in more ways than ever before. The Daily Mail US broke dozens of exclusives, sat down with insiders and people in power, and published some of the most accurate polling out there and we saw record-breaking amounts of traffic to our website leading up to and throughout the election, particularly on our mobile homepage. But we’ve also seen a tremendous appetite from our users to consume their news in new ways, be that TikTok, our social channels, video and podcasts and more.

“Under the Trump administration we’re going to continue doing what the Daily Mail does best – focus on the engaging stories our readers want to talk about in their daily lives – at the office, the bar, the school run etc. Our election numbers are a clear vote from readers that they love what we are doing and we will continue to hold those in power to account while maintaining our fun, audacious and distinctive Daily Mail voice.”

‘It’s easy to get over-reliant on polls’

Naja Nielsen, director of digital, channel and weather – BBC News

“I oversaw the BBC’s coverage from our Washington Bureau and, I have to say, I think BBC News overall covered it well.

“What in my opinion made BBC News stand out from especially a lot of the US media, was our impartiality and our focus on the voters.

“We also reported and analysed various polls, but it’s easy to get over-reliant on polls and as we have seen, once again, when it comes to gauging the mood among the voters nothing beats boots on the ground and our correspondents and reporters talking to the voters everywhere.

“On top of that first-hand reporting, our Voter Voices initiative proved very valuable. It’s a panel of voters with all types of views and backgrounds that feed into our reporting and help us present a range of views. There are many nuances in the viewpoints of Republicans as well as Democrats and all those who support neither and we wanted to capture that breadth.

“We are also lucky to have a team of expert Washington bureaux who know the country and its politics inside out and we were able to give audiences the benefit of a team at the top of their game – explaining the nuances of the US system and culture to a global audience.

“Our commitment to impartial and transparency also makes us uniquely placed in the US, as well as in the UK. Our investment in BBC Verify US made it possible for us to counter misinformation, and our curious and critical approach to all opinions is something a lot of people are looking for in these often very divisive times.

“This saw us reach huge numbers of people who were coming to us for a source of news they could trust – to cut through the noise and get a clear view. We never take sides, and I genuinely see all of our journalists reporting with open, curious and critical minds. I was following a lot of UK and US coverage and when it became clear, Trump would win, you could hear the tone change across most of US Election shows in one way or another, whereas our team kept being on the ball, reporting the story with no agenda.

“On Tuesday and Wednesday alone our digital journalism attracted around 61 million users – showing what an appetite there is, not only for news on the US election, but for the clarity and impartial view that only the BBC can give.”

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The re-election of Donald Trump has been followed by a boost to the share prices of several publicly-traded news businesses.

The rises, which are part of a broader record-setting surge in the US stock market following the election, indicate the market has bet on growth at these companies under the new administration.

But they put investor confidence at odds with the mood of many journalists in the US who see Trump’s campaign trail threats as indicators of a challenging editorial and business environment to come.

Gains at the nine listed news businesses analysed by Press Gazette were in most cases larger than the gains in the S&P 500 index which tracks the performance of the US stock market.

We have tried to select companies with a greater focus on news publishing, so this group misses some entities with large entertainment portfolios, for example CNN parent Warner Bros Discovery and CBS parent Paramount Global, although both those companies have also seen their prices rise this week.

Rupert Murdoch-owned News Corporation and Fox Corporation, which both boast right-leaning brands supportive of Trump, have both seen share price growth this week — but in both cases their prices grew less than those of liberal rivals.

Daily Beast and Dotdash Meredith parent IAC for example was among the biggest risers, seeing its price grow 10% between the ends of Monday and Thursday and 5.6% compared with a month earlier. (Like the rest of the market, share prices at most of the companies analysed here dipped in the immediate run-up to the election.)

The New York Times Company, too, saw its share price rise 6.4% versus Monday (when its price dropped following its third quarter earnings report) to $55.80.

The biggest "Trump trade" beneficiary in the short term was USA Today parent company and local publishing giant Gannett, which saw its share price jump 12% to $5.50 — however this followed a large drop in its price last week when it posted a loss of $19.7m in the third quarter. The company closed on Thursday trading at 0.7% less than its price a month earlier.

Fellow local newspaper publisher Lee Enterprises was the only corporation on the list to have lost value across the week of the election, although its share price appreciated significantly on Thursday and the losses come after its share price nearly doubled in October.

What's behind the share price rises at US news publishers?

The media price rises are odds with Trump's both historic and recent hostility toward the press.

Speaking at a rally two days before the election Trump declared: "To get me, somebody would have to shoot through the fake news - and I don't mind that so much." Declaring victory on Wednesday, he similarly referred to publishers CNN and MSNBC as "the enemy camp" while describing running mate JD Vance's willingness to appear on those networks.

At the end of October Trump began a lawsuit against CBS News, claiming the broadcaster had edited a 60 Minutes interview with opponent Kamala Harris in order "to paper over Kamala's 'word salad' weakness". He has also spoken of a desire to strip broadcast licences from networks he felt were treating him unfairly.

Former Trump National Security Council advisor Kash Patel, who has been tipped for roles in the new administration, has previously insisted a new Trump government will prosecute journalists for helping Joe Biden "rig presidential elections".

The price rises may simply reflect broader investor belief that anticipated Trump tax cuts will benefit business performance across corporate America, including at news companies.

Several publishers saw significant subscription and revenue boosts during the first Trump administration, although experts have expressed scepticism over whether the phenomenon will be repeated.

Commenting on the share price boost at the NYT, Barron's associate editor Andrew Bary wrote this week: "The Trump win probably is good for all news media since he generates buzz and controversy that is good for viewership, subscriber growth, and engagement. Few things sell newspapers—or their current equivalent—better than Trump."

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Media pundits and pollsters were left with red faces after Donald Trump moved towards a comfortable victory in the US presidential election.

Most media commentators have repeatedly said the US election was “too close to call” and all opinion polls had predicted an extremely close result on election night.

The polls had largely predicted a narrow Kamala Harris victory in the popular vote with varying predictions on whether Harris or Trump would win the electoral college.

Instead, Trump appears to have won a comfortable victory in both the popular vote and the Electoral College.

Opinion polls similarly failed to predict Trump’s previous election victory in 2016, instead favouring Hillary Clinton.

The Rest Is Politics podcast host Rory Stewart said this week he was “utterly convinced” Kamala Harris would win the election and even went as far as to say the bookmakers had it wrong by making Trump the favourite and saying he would bet £1,000 on the vice president.

This morning he said: “When a result happens you rewrite history. If she was currently winning we would have a very good answer for why she was winning.”

Most of his fellow hosts on The Rest Is Politics US Election Livestream – Marina Hyde, Anthony Scaramucci and Alastair Campbell – also predicted a Kamala Harris win. Only fellow host historian Dominc Sandbrook correctly predicted a Trump win.

At time of writing, the Rest Is Politics US Election Livestream had racked up more than one million views on Youtube.

Sun political editor Harry Cole said on The Sun’s Never Mind the Ballots video show that “pundits went so out for Harris for no other reason than it made themselves feel better and they could just sleep better at night and they look like [expletive beeped] now don’t they?

“There was no reason for pundits to go so hard on Harris when you could look at the fundamentals, it wasn’t there, the concerns about the polls from 2016 and from 2020 were there. The polls have completely skewed the coverage of the election.”

Daily Mail columnist Andrew Neil said on 3 November: “This election started as a dead heat and it’s got even closer… You’re talking about a couple of thousand votes in each swing state could make the difference.”

On the same day Rory Stewart said: “This won’t be a close race decided by a ‘couple of thousand votes’. He is wrong. And Kamala Harris will win.”

Pennsylvania was expected to be the closest swing state, but at time of writing Trump was predicted to have won it with a relatively comfortable margin of over two percentage points, or nearly 200,000 votes.

Polling expert and founder of Five Thirty Eight Nate Silver said on Tuesday he had run 80,000 models and the election was “literally closer than a coin flip” on the eve of the poll but on his simulations Harris was slightly more likely to win than Trump. In the 2016 US election his website Five Thirty Eight wrongly predicted a Hillary Clinton victory.

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Given the fact pollsters got the the 2016 and 2020 US presidential election results wrong, Semafor co-founder Ben Smith believes old-fashioned journalistic methods are coming back into fashion.

He told Press Gazette on Monday: “The kind of people who made fun of going to diners and talking to Americans about what they’re thinking are now kind of wondering what Americans in diners are thinking. And so I do think there’s a full circle there.”

Semafor’s coverage of the 2024 US election focuses around on-the-ground reporting from bellwether regions in the belief that this will provide early indications of where the election is heading.

The site’s political reporter David Weigel has picked 20 counties that Semafor will report on as bellwethers starting with Terre Haute in Indiana. Over election night Semafor will fill in its bellwethers map to provide a point of difference in its reporting. In an election that may not be called for days, these votes could also provide an early indication of who has won.

Launched two years ago, Semafor is a free news website which makes its money from advertising and events and aims to provide a more global view. Its coverage is a mixture of original reporting and analysis (which is combined in the same article, so that reporters share their view as a postscript about what each story means).

In a polarised US media scene where even staying neutral can have harsh consequences (as The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times found out in recent weeks) Smith believes Semafor’s non-partisan coverage has been well received.

“We’ve fought really hard to be open to different perspectives, not just wire service neutral. And we’ve had a lot of conversations with central figures.

“We’ve interviewed Trump three times and he only stormed out once, which I think is a good ratio…

“I think people feel like we’re accurate and trustworthy and fair, and that in the US is obviously a pretty hard place to hold, and we’re really proud of that.

“I do feel like there’s a sizeable number of readers who are really exhausted by the sense that the media, and social media in particular, have become expert in manipulating your emotions and that when you click, when you can’t turn off the cable channel, it’s essentially because they’re manipulating you and telling you what you want to hear, or scaring you.

“I think people increasingly want to understand what’s happening and are looking for something different.”

Semafor has had a strong year commercially

Asked whether it has been a good election for Semafor commercially, he said: “We’ve had a really strong year. If you told me two years ago this is where we’d be, I’d be pretty happy.”

He noted that the big commercial winners on advertising for the election will have been network TV affiliate stations in swing states and the tech giants delivering targeted local advertising: Tiktok, Meta and Google. But he said Semafor has seen some uptick in advertising on newsletters.

Semafor recently reported on an internal townhall-style meeting at The New York Times which included journalists airing concerns that coverage was “sanewashing” Donald Trump, so failing to highlight his more outrageous statements.

Asked whether US media has got coverage of Trump right this time, former New York Times media reporter Smith said: “I think the media is always sort of fighting the last war and learning the lesson of the last cycle.

“One of the lessons at one point was seen as being, you can’t just give this guy your platform and print whatever outrageous thing he says to get attention.

“And I think there was an overcorrection and then suddenly Democrats actually were like ‘wait, wait, he’s saying a bunch of unpopular things, why aren’t you telling your audiences about it?’

“He does present a challenge with his core style which is to say something outrageous so that he gets scolded by the media, so that he can turn to his followers and supporters and say ‘see, they hate me too’…

“I think there’s a tendency sometimes in the media to overestimate the new, to sort of arrive within the future a little before the future actually gets here.

“I think if Harris wins, we’ll look back and say we sure spent a lot of time talking about Joe Rogan and about young men who didn’t wind up voting, and we didn’t really cover the kind of middle-aged and older white women and what media were they consuming.”

Political reporting has come ‘full circle’ after over-reliance on polls

Asked about whether the US media has become too obsessed with reporting on opinion polls, rather than on the political issues which divide the candidates – a concern raised during the UK election earlier this year – Smith said: “I was coming up as a political reporter in like 2004 and 2008, there was among political journalists and among readers on blogs and in social media huge disdain for qualitative journalism; the kind of journalist who saw their job as talking to thousands of people around the country, travelling a lot, and trying to explain to readers in Washington or New York or wherever kind of what was the sense of the country.

“That was really replaced by the new technologies: increasingly sophisticated polling and the aggregation of polling and looking at Twitter, either by injecting it directly into your veins, or by doing sentiment analysis.

“It is just a matter of fact that in the last two US presidential contests, the polling averages have been badly wrong…

“I think having real expertise is now back in fashion and the kind of people who made fun of going to diners and talking to Americans about what they’re thinking, are now kind of wondering what Americans in diners are thinking”

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Former Washington Post executive editor Marty Baron has said the newspaper “over-expanded” amid an advertising collapse and failed to match up to The New York Times on the bundle.

Baron, who led the Post from 2013 until his retirement in 2021, was asked to discuss the state of paywalls during a Q&A session at the WAN-IFRA World News Media Congress in Copenhagen on Tuesday.

The Washington Post does not report its subscriber numbers but is believed to have around 2.5 million, down from a peak of three million at the end of 2020.

Giving his analysis, Baron said: “The situation at the Post is they invested heavily in hiring a lot of staff. They way over-expanded at a time that digital advertising was collapsing. So that was a problem.”

Marty Baron on Washington Post failure to win bundle war

He said that when Jeff Bezos acquired the Post in 2013 he “talked immediately about reconstituting the bundle, like what newspapers used to be as a place where you got information on all sorts of things, things that you could use in your daily life, et cetera, not just news.

“But the reality is The New York Times did a better job of reconstituting the bundle. They did reconstitute the bundle… and we didn’t do it adequately.

“I mean, we soared on the basis of coverage of politics, investigations, a lot of other things that helped drive that coverage. But when Trump left office, there was a collapse in interest in political news, Biden wasn’t nearly as interesting, and people started taking the press for granted again.

“Before, they weren’t taking the press for granted. They felt that there were very few institutions that were going to hold Trump accountable. They didn’t have confidence that Congress would do it. They didn’t have confidence that the courts would do it. And so they were looking at the press and when they looked at the press in the United States, they looked at two institutions, The New York Times and The Washington Post.

“But in terms of subscriptions, yes it’s true that a lot of people have dropped their subscriptions, partially for economic reasons, partially through a lack of interest, partially because for us, for the Post, politics was less interesting.

“I think there are a whole range of issues. There’s always a lot of churn and so you offer people discounts, and then when you want to charge them full price, they drop it. We faced this in the newspaper industry for decades, lots of churn of that sort. So getting past that is, I think, a huge challenge.”

Baron pointed out that news subscriptions are “not that expensive” compared to “what people spend for a bottle of water”.

He cited a conversation with interns when he was still at the Boston Globe, where he was editor between 2001 to 2012, after it launched its paywall in 2011.

They said “we’re college students, we can’t afford a subscription” and he responded: “Is that true?… Well, how much do you spend on beer every week?”

He told them: “You choose to spend your money on something else. What we need to do is we need to persuade people and demonstrate to people, day in and day out and all day long, that we are providing concrete value to their lives, not just in terms of the coverage of news…”

The New York Times has been successful, he said, by insinuating itself into people’s daily routine through the games they play in the mornings through to checking Wirecutter when they need to buy something.

“So they have demonstrated their value and they’re seeing the benefits of that. And what all news organisations need to do, from the biggest to the smallest at the local level, is demonstrate that you’re providing absolutely essential reading, or if you’re a broadcast outlet, same thing, something that people really value.”

Marty Baron: News industry facing ‘radical reinvention’

Baron also commented on the “turmoil” facing news organisations with at least 8,000 journalism jobs cut in the UK and North America in 2023 and 1,700 in 2024 so far and put it down to the fact the industry is being “radically reinvented”.

He also noted the media industry is not the only one making large-scale layoffs, pointing to the tech industry.

“We’re going through a radical reinvention of our business in every way, in terms of our internal processes all the way to how we tell stories,” Baron said.

“The way we tell stories is changing. What you need to do, I mean, it’s not necessarily us [the Post], but others are telling stories on Tiktok in ten seconds and 15 second videos and we may not like that, but the consumer does. And so the question is, how do we change the way that we tell stories?

“I think there’s no question that storytelling will become much more visual, that we will have to incorporate in every story we do whatever tool happens to be the best way to tell the story, whether it’s an interactive graphic or whether it’s a video, or whether it’s audio, or whether it’s actual text, or some combination of that in a story, and then that has to become sort of a routine in our business and that’s very much in mind that people have shorter attention span these days, and how do we adapt to that?”

However Baron noted that there are younger media organisations “that are doing quite well, and we should look at those and try to understand why are they succeeding?”

He cited technology publications The Information, 404 Media and Platformer as well as non-profit outlets Chalkbeat, which covers the education sector, and Spotlight PA, which publishes news and investigations for Pennsylvania.

‘If we act as combatants, we should give up on incurring public’s trust’

On Trump, Baron said the ex-president and his allies want the press to be the opposition and journalists must ensure they don’t fall into that trap or they will lose public trust.

He said: “There’s no question that various governments and politicians and political parties… are at war with us. But I think it’s very important that we not see ourselves as combatants – that we see ourselves as professionals, and that we behave like professionals. The minute that we start acting like combatants, we should just give up on incurring the public’s trust.

“At the beginning of the Trump administration, Steve Bannon, who was then the aide of his who’s now back in the campaign, said that the press is the opposition party, he wants the press to act like the opposition party. And if the press does behave like the opposition parties, then it just falls into the trap that they are setting for us and it gives them an opportunity, it gives them ammunition, to say they’re just the Democratic Party, there’s no difference between the press and the Democratic Party. So it’s important that we maintain our standards, that we behave appropriately, we behave as professionals and that we maintain our institution.

“The institution of the press is fundamental to a democracy. We will actually help end up eroding and destroying the institution of the press if we don’t have institutional standards, if we don’t have standards of behaviour for ourselves, then what makes us different from anybody else? What makes us different from an activist? What makes us different from an advocate? They’re all respectable roles in society… But you’re journalists.

“Now, we’re not stenographers, okay, we’re not stenographers. That’s a different thing. We’re journalists. So that means that we need to look behind the curtain and we need to look beneath the surface with the goal of getting at the truth and giving that to the public in a fearless and direct and straightforward way. Not false equivalence, not false balance, none of that. It’s an open mind. Go find the truth, look at the evidence as it is, and then evaluate honestly and honourably and all that, and then tell people what you’ve actually found.”

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Emily Maitlis has said journalists are “kidding” themselves if they believe they’re “leading the conversation” around Donald Trump.

Maitlis, a former Newsnight and BBC Americast presenter who now co-hosts Global’s The News Agents podcast and its weekly US version, told an audience in London on Wednesday that she did not think the media had “learned the lessons of 2016”.

She was speaking on a panel at the Sir Harry Evans Summit titled “The Media And Trump 2.0”, which saw prominent journalists and media executives wrangling over how the news industry should cover the former president who is again the Republican candidate.

Trump, who leads incumbent president Joe Biden in some polls ahead of November’s election, has insisted since late 2020 that the last election was rigged against him despite consistent findings by courts and election officials that this was not the case.

The former president’s frequent use of falsehoods has raised complications for journalists, who have struggled over how they should cover him without amplifying inaccurate claims or opening themselves to accusations of bias.

Speaking about this on Wednesday, Maitlis referred to her 2022 Edinburgh Television Festival MacTaggart Lecture, commenting: “I said the rules have changed, the politicians have changed, the actors have changed and the journalists need to get with it — you need to understand what’s going on.

“And I actually thought, two years later, we’d be in a different place, and I don’t think we are.”

She said the problem for journalists is that “we’re dealing with somebody who can raise millions off a mugshot on a mug. So we’re kidding ourselves if we think we as broadcasters are leading the conversation”.

Maitlis linked this point to the ability of public figures to communicate directly with their audiences through social media: “If you go and talk to Elon Musk, if you do an interview with Elon Musk, it doesn’t matter how much heavy TV equipment you’ve got — they’re recording it, they will put out their clips before you get yours on air. And their clips will show Elon Musk in the light that he wants to be seen. Same with Trump.”

Kara Swisher: NYT editor Joe Kahn ‘is living in another era’

Earlier this month New York Times executive editor Joe Kahn publicly waded into the debate around covering Trump, telling Semafor that “​​it is not the job of the news media to prevent” his re-election and asking whether the title’s critics wanted it to become “Xinhua News Agency or Pravda and put out a stream of stuff that’s very, very favourable to [Biden] and only write negative stories about the other side”.

[Read more: How New York Times plans to cover Donald Trump’s third presidential campaign]

The comments reportedly caused annoyance among NYT staffers and they also irritated Maitlis’ co-panellist at the event, former New York Times columnist Kara Swisher, who said: “Joe is living in another era. When I read that, I’m like: ‘You’ve got to be fucking kidding me, Joe.’

“A lot of people at The New York Times, even though they defended him, said [the same thing] to me…

“What are you talking about? Why do you have to go to Chinese news agency? Why can’t you just point out the problems? Of course he had to make it either you’re very fair or you’re the Chinese news agency. I was like: there’s something in between those two things!”

Swisher was not in complete disagreement with Kahn, who had emphasised that Trump cannot be downplayed in coverage because he has a good shot at winning the presidency.

She told the audience: “One of the things that drives me crazy is when I hear a lot of: ‘Why are you platforming that person? Why are you doing this?’ I mean, you get that from a lot of people, right?

“Guess what? He’s running for president and he could win and he’s ahead. And so you can’t ignore it and get on a high horse without engaging with it… It is the new normal, whether you like it or not. And so you have to figure out ways, as journalists, to deal with it.”

Emily Maitlis, Kara Swisher, Jeff Zucker and Jorge Ramos on how they think the media should cover Trump

Some of the journalists on stage argued the way to “deal with it” is to consistently contradict false claims made by Trump and emphasise that he attempted to undermine an election result.

Jorge Ramos, a Univision anchor who was ejected from a Trump press conference in 2015, said: “We have to confront him. That’s the way to deal with him — to confront him every single time…

“You cannot remain neutral. At the end it’s a matter of credibility, of trust. And the only way people are going to trust us — we cannot treat him as if he were a normal candidate.

“I think the most important responsibility that we have is to challenge those who are in power. There’s a beautiful word in Spanish — contrapoder, ‘against-power’. If you’re always contrapoder, on the other side of power, you’ll be fine.”

Maitlis, who attempted this kind of fact-checking approach with pro-Trump congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene in March before being told to “fuck off” by the lawmaker, acknowledged the efficacy of her questioning was undercut by the fact Taylor Greene had “loved” the clip.

But she added: “I sometimes wonder whether you couldn’t justify mentioning January the 6th [when Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol] every time you talk about Donald Trump’s campaign.

“Because if you don’t, you’re ignoring the fact that he tried to ignore the public vote, the public’s will, for an election. How on Earth can you talk about a campaign to be president when he could do it again? You know — we talk about what happens if Donald Trump wins, what happens if Donald Trump loses? We’ll go through the whole thing again!”

Jeff Zucker, the attempted Telegraph buyer and former CNN president who led the network during the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections, said that we now “have a better sense of who [Trump] is and what he’s trying to do.

“I agree with Jorge — I don’t think it’s necessary to cover the motorcade from Trump Tower to the courthouse [for Trump’s trials] and things like that. I don’t think we have to take every one of those press conferences live. Those are the mistakes that I made [in previous elections]. I own them.

“That is not why he was elected president of the United States, but I don’t think we should be repeating things like that this time.”

However, he emphasised Trump “is the candidate for president again. He could very well win. I think what he says, what he does, is news — but I also don’t think that there’s necessarily two sides to every story… It’s okay not to be neutral as long as you know the objective truth.”

Swisher, on the other hand, said Trump is “a master troll”.

Referring to the 2015 clip of Ramos attempting to question Trump before he was ejected, she said: “You have to understand how it’s being consumed by the consumer on the end, and it is not that [clip]…

“He’s doing that for the cutting of it, to put it out for fundraising and everything else. He doesn’t care about progressives, so sometimes we become willing idiots to what he’s doing, because we’re characters in his strange little demented play…

“That is not what people are seeing. They’re seeing clips, they’re seeing it mixed up, they’re seeing it a different way. People are taking the news and then making the news [themselves], and that’s what’s difficult.”

Swisher also laid out her “dream of interviewing” Trump, saying: “I would do it at Mar-a-Lago, in the lobby, on a velvet couch… so he feels safe. And then I will get him… Everybody would watch the hell out of it.”

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Donald Trump‘s golf resort in Aberdeenshire has lost a complaint to the UK’s biggest press regulator against The Scotsman over two articles about its food hygiene standards.

Trump International Golf Club Scotland Limited, for which Trump’s sons Donald Trump Jr and Eric Trump are listed as directors on Companies House, claimed the article was inaccurate because it “created a false narrative that the resort was currently operating an unsafe environment for consumers and that the problems were ongoing”.

The first article, published on 16 September last year, reported that the Trump International Golf Links resort in Scotland failed to “achieve a pass grade under a national food hygiene scheme” and had been served an “improvement notice” the previous year.

Some of the issues reportedly included “[d]irty chopping boards and appliances, food handlers failing to wash their hands properly, and sausage meat found to be nearly three months out of date”.

The second article was a leader column headlined “Make Trump resort restaurant great again” and noted of the former US president that it was “rather ironic that the self-confessed germophobe’s business should have been ordered to make improvements by environmental health officials over cleanliness and food safety issues”.

The business argued it had not “failed” anything and that it had addressed the necessary improvements asked for by the council, later receiving a “pass” certificate in March 2023 which was not mentioned in the article.

The Scotsman had got information from the Aberdeenshire Council website, which it turned out had not been updated properly to include the latest inspection. This information was wrongly confirmed before publication by the council, which has since apologised to the newspaper. The Scotsman published a correction to this effect after the complaint came in.

Trump International also said it was inaccurate for the print article to use a photo of MacLeod House, the hotel at the Trump International golf resort, because it was the golf clubhouse and not the hotel that had been inspected. It also claimed it had not been contacted for comment although the publication could show a reporter had contacted an email address that had previously received a response.

What IPSO said about the Trump International complaint

The complaints committee of the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO), the UK’s biggest press regulator, said the article was entitled to characterise the resort as having “failed” because it explained why it had not met the requirements for a “pass” status.

It also noted all the ways the publication had tried to verify the information: “it had made an FOI request regarding the inspection; checked the council’s website; contacted the council to verify whether the information on its website was correct in regard to the inspection status; and had also attempted to contact the complainant with several questions… None of these steps provided information which indicated that the claim was inaccurate.”

It said The Scotsman had therefore taken sufficient care over the accuracy of the information.

IPSO said it was not significantly inaccurate for the article to refer to the location in question as the hotel or illustrate the article with a photo of the hotel “as the resort was comprised of the hotel and golf clubhouse”.

IPSO did say the article required correction, however, because the inaccuracy about the most recent food hygiene status was “significant given it related to the hygiene standards of a resort which would likely have an impact on its custom and reputation”.

But it said the newspaper had published a correction sufficiently promptly after receiving the complaint and verifying the new information with the council.

Trump International had demanded an apology, but IPSO said this was not necessary: “The Committee were of the view that the publication had taken care over the accuracy of the article, had corrected the error promptly and prominently, and had included a substantial part of a statement supplied by the complainant.”

Trump International complained to IPSO’s independent complaints reviewer about the process followed by the regulator in handling its complaint, but the reviewer “decided that the process was not flawed and did not uphold the request for review”.

Read the full IPSO ruling here.

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New York Times executive editor Joseph Kahn has said covering Donald Trump is a challenge that requires a balance between sharing his statements, even when they are false, and contextualising but not censoring them.

Speaking at the INMA World Congress of News Media in London on Wednesday, Kahn said covering Trump is a “particular challenge” and it takes a “certain skill” to write about him.

“Our view is that when you have a candidate who does frequently indulge in conspiracy theories or depart from the facts and can hold an audience captive with long kind of soliloquies that actually don’t contain real information in them, we have to do more than just provide a platform for that,” Kahn, who took on the top editorial job at The New York Times in June 2022 and was managing editor during Trump’s presidency, said.

“On the other hand, we do need to cover what he’s saying. We need to cover what he’s putting on Truth Social, we need to cover how he entertains or tries to enliven his audiences at his rallies, we need to give people a full sense of that. So I think you need to write about it with a certain skill.

“People need to basically have some version of fact checking in real time… But the idea that we’d stop covering Trump, or because Trump provides misinformation we should just not give people a sense of how those rallies are going or what he’s putting on his platform Truth Social, I think in some ways actually takes him too much out of the news cycle.”

It has been an unusual start to the US presidential election cycle, Kahn said, because both Trump and incumbent Joe Biden had their party nominations secured early.

This means, he said, the media needs to “find good, intelligent ways of scrutinising both, and getting those into the news cycle regularly so people have a full sense of what they’re voting for.

“So I think actually, the problem at the moment is not giving Donald Trump a platform to say whatever he wants, it’s making sure that we give people a full sense of who he is, in some cases the conspiracy theories that he’s indulging and putting forward, a full sort of fact-checked version of what he’s posting on Truth Social which is mobilising his audience day in and day out.

“We have a responsibility to help people, to guide people through that.”

The New York Times recently had its credibility score downgraded by rating agency Newsguard because, the company said, “its derision of Trump courses through basic news stories”.

Why ‘both sides’ journalism amounts to a ‘lack of knowledge’

Kahn said The New York Times does not practice “both sides” journalism.

“Typically, when people say both sides, what they mean is ‘we don’t actually do the journalistic work involved of helping the reader to see what’s true and what’s not true’. And that’s not the way that we approach a story.”

He said: “We are helping people to understand the world through as much of a well-rounded report as we possibly can, and putting the information and also the perspectives in the hands of our readers, and helping them make the best decisions. So we’re not partisan, but that’s not the same thing as saying that we just have an equivalent view of misinformation and real information, because we don’t.”

New York Times staff must ‘sign up for a journalistic mission’

Kahn also addressed how rows within the newsroom can flare up because of disagreements in viewpoints among The New York Times’s 2,000 journalists.

He said The New York Times is “not a platform for people to express their personal values. We have to require that they sign up for a journalistic mission. And the journalistic mission does require that you put facts ahead of your own personal views. And that’s not intuitive to a lot of people.

“I think we just have to acknowledge that people tend not to be taught that in college. To be honest with you, I’m afraid they’re not really taught that in journalism school, either.” The newsbrand therefore has to build that culture internally instead, he added.

“I think good journalists are open to it, including young journalists, but it is not a skill set that comes automatically or organically,” he said.

“And basically… we’re not requiring that people leave their experience behind. We’re not requiring that people stop having the ethnic or racial identity that they grew up with, we’re not requiring that they get rid of family members or friends who have certain views, we’re not requiring that they change their personal values. Those are all things which are specific to individuals and we acknowledge that everybody has those things in their background.

“What we are requiring is that they come to work at The New York Times, that they are committed to being part of an organisation that will frequently do journalism on subjects which they personally don’t consider to be fully aligned with their own personal desires or values.

“We will write about things – on our opinion pages we will host guest essays from people who are not your favourite, necessarily. In our news pages, we will explore issues in detail that look at issues around the world from the perspective of people who are not necessarily those who you would choose to go have a beer with, right. And that’s part of being at a news organisation and you have to want to be part of an independent news organisation that is exploring all those issues and, on occasion, upsetting you.”

Kahn said he welcomes journalists raising disagreements with how a story has been covered internally, even at large internal town hall meetings – but he is against them sharing those concerns publicly.

“Criticism, listening to a variety of perspectives, encouraging debate in the newsroom have to be part of a healthy newsroom. Taking to broadcast social media channels to undermine your colleagues should not be.”

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Heidi Legg is the lead Research Fellow at the Future of Media Project at the Institute of Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University. Here, she presents some new research into US political donations made by media owners and executives.

Media mogul William Randolph Hearst famously declared: “This is my newspaper, these are my views, take or leave it.” Hearst boldly placed his editorials on the front page, with his picture, signed “for God’s sake.” There was no subterfuge.

We now live in a much less transparent time.

This summer, I led a team of students from Tufts and Harvard that dug through the Federal Election Commission (FEC) database to track the political donations at 90 of the top US media news organisations.

The results were surprising. Only 14.5% of the 412 owners, executives, board members, and investors had made donations to individual candidates, traditional PACs or Super PACs from January 2020 to August 2021, trackable by the FEC. Super PACs have the freedom to delay reporting to bi-annual so there may be more to come.

Soros, Bloomberg, Murdoch, Powell Jobs

There were a few notable funders.

The most significant donation record of any media owner was Michael Bloomberg, who donated over $140m during his run for president.

George Soros, one of the major donors to Wikipedia who also funds many new digital media outlets through his Open Society Foundation (see our nonprofit US Media Index), gave $3,679,800 to Democratic candidates.

He was closely followed by Laurene Powell Jobs, who donated over $2m to Democrats. She owns the Atlantic and funds many digital news nonprofits through the American Journalism Project, which her Emerson Collective helped to create.

Bob Iger, executive chairman of Walt Disney and who once ran ABC, gave over $1m to the Dems.

Discovery’s David Zaslav, who is leading a merger with CNN, donated over $240,000 to the Dems.

Billionaire Paul Singer, who reportedly played a key role in the CNN-Discovery merger, balanced things out with his $1.7m to the GOP.

It was no shock to see the GOP fared well from Fox News.

Rupert Murdoch and his son Lachlan collectively gave over $2.5m, mostly to Republicans and not to be outdone by their son and brother, James Murdoch, who left the family business and donated over $2.25m to the Democrats.

Newsmax owner Chris Ruddy gave $365,000 to Trump and his Win Red, while the Daily Caller’s Omeek Malik donated $150,000.

Henry Kravis and George Roberts, the co-chairmen and co-CEOs of private equity giant KKR (which owns Axel Springer and its subsidiaries including Insider and soon Politico), collectively gave the GOP over $1m.

Marc Rowan over at Apollo Management, the private equity firm that recently acquired Yahoo for $5bn, gave the GOP $1.75m.

Townhall Media co-owner Edward Astinger, a leading evangelical, gave just shy of $30,000 to GOP candidates. Townhall is a leading source for conservative news, podcasts, political cartoons, and breaking stories online.

Tech leaders’ donation figures come up surprisingly short

Overall, only 60 people in media leadership had donated $2,000 or more to a political candidate since January 2020 – a good thing for those who run our media ecosystem to stay out of politics.

But here is where it fell short.

Did Elon Musk, one of the biggest donors to Wikipedia, really give only $40,000 to politics and the DC machine in 2020-2021?

Marc Benioff, the current owner of Time, active in homelessness issues in San Francisco, gave just $5,000 to his SalesForce PAC.

His fellow tech giants – who control much of our information ecosystem – are similarly elusive.

Jeff Bezos, who owns the Washington Post, gave but $15,000 in total over the past 20 months through his PACs Blue Origin and Amazon, while his net worth grew to near $200bn.

Susan Wojcicki, a major donor to Wikipedia and CEO of YouTube, only donated $8,000 through Google Netpac.

That’s it? I found these figures wanting.

Is this newly minted class of wealth really absent from politics and political influence? Where do they give money for political gain around regulation and governance?

To figure this out, we are in desperate need of a real-time database for Super PAC spending along with transparency on which media and platform owners fund lobbyists.

The lack of transparency in Super PAC donations loomed as we scoured the FEC database.

It is near impossible to know where the money is spent – think detangling fine copper wire – even if you can run down the roster of donors.

For context, OpenSecrets reported that political spending in the 2020 election reached $14bn, the most expensive election ever. Our system is awash in billions of political dollars. I don’t see how this ends well.

Journalism and politics have long been bedfellows. Ben Franklin owned the Pennsylvania Gazette 50 years before he inked the Declaration of Independence. Hearst inherited the San Francisco Examiner from his father, a Democrat senator from California and then went on to win two terms as a congressman from New York. Joseph Pulitzer, publisher of New York World and St. Louis Post-Dispatch, another leading national figure in the Democratic Party and elected congressman from New York, also made his political views known, and his legacy funded the Pulitzer Prize and helped create the Columbia School of Journalism.

Bloomberg and Murdoch donations ‘are now bizarrely comforting’

The Bloomberg, Powell Jobs and Murdoch setups are now bizarrely comforting. At least we know where they stand, in a time when so much funding of media and social media content is hard to track and could even be foreign.

Full transparency of political funding allows journalists inside and outside the newsroom to hold these newsroom and social media platform owners to account.

We need radical transparency from media and social media platforms on which politicians, Super PACs and lobbyists they fund.

Without it, journalists and society don’t stand a chance to hold them accountable when the coverage is of disrepute.

The ludicrous lack of transparency became abundantly clear when we typed in ‘Mark Zuckerberg’ to the FEC system. The one in California is listed only once from 2020-2021 as donating $5,000 through Facebook Inc. PAC in 2020.

Comparatively, Sheryl Sandberg has transparently donated over $500,000, mostly to Democrats and a super PAC called Women Vote! She is consistently listed as COO and her employer as Facebook in FEC filings.

And yet, it was her $2,850 donation to Arizona GOP candidate April Becker that caught our attention. Mark Zuckerberg also gave $3,200 on the same date to April Becker in Arizona.

However, this Mark Zuckerberg was based in Michigan. His occupation was listed as “ass wipe” and his employer as “Pelosi Butts.”

We are being mocked.

Too many people in power are gaming the system.

The government needs to catch up and revamp how we track media money in politics.

Look up your friends and patriots here at FEC. You will see that I gave to Hillary Clinton many times. There is no shame in revealing your cards: I wanted a highly qualified woman president in my lifetime. Now you can read my work with that feminist lens in mind. That is how we build a society of critical thinkers—transparency matters.

Picture credit: Reuters/Mike Segar

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