The World

Although I make my living as a newspaper commentator, I still find it depressing that The Guardian’s reaction to its current financial difficulties (that’s putting it mildly) is likely to be be reduce the amount of news in the paper – and to increase the amount of comment. The rationale is that their readers get their breaking news from other sources, and that they look to the newspaper for comment and context. But I wonder whether there isn’t another unspoken rationale. Producing news is expensive; producing comment is cheap.

At The Economist, a few years ago, we used to have a rough rule that maintaining a foreign correspondent overseas costs, at least, £500,000 a year – once you included salary, expenses, travel, the costs of running an office etc. The Guardian still has a good number of foreign correspondents. But I suspect they, along with other news-gatherers, may be cut back in this new comment-driven world.

The irony, of course, is that for comment to have any value, it relies on a decent supply of facts – otherwise it is just vulgar prejudice. So if the number of commentators goes up, and the number of journalists actually providing the facts goes down – then the whole debate is impoverished. Certainly in my world, of foreign news, you can see that the number of foreign correspondents maintained by the big western news organisations has been going down steadily. Because, of course, its not just the Guardian that is in trouble. So are other stalwarts of the news world – from Le Monde to Newsweek to the New York Times.

I don’t want to deny the need for drastic action at The Guardian. They can’t continue to burn money at the current rate. But the paper’s well regarded web-site is called “Comment is Free”. Perhaps the people who run the paper should remember the other half of that sentence – “But the facts are sacred.”