Guardian CEO: my newspaper can’t survive in the UK

The chief executive of The Guardian has delivered a rather grim verdict about the newspaper’s future (or lack thereof). ‘At the moment, I believe we could not survive in the U.K,’ says Andrew Miller, blaming the ‘oversupply’ of newspapers and the omnipresence of the BBC. He has been speaking to the New Yorker magazine which has run one of its brilliant investigations (read it all here) and his verdict is reinforced by the editor, Alan Rusbridger, who (the piece says) ‘can envisage a paperless Guardian in five to ten years’. Rusbridger can also ‘imagine…printing on only certain days’. So the newspaper that came out with the slogan ‘we own the weekend‘ may soon have to add an appendage: ‘Mondays to Fridays… Not so much.’

You don’t have to look hard to see what sparks Rusbridger’s imagination. The Guardian does brilliantly online, with 84 million unique users each month. But print sales have halved over the last ten years and on current trends the paper will lose its last reader by the end of this decade.