Transcript: The British Paper That Americans Are Rushing to Read

Guardian US managing editor Steve Sachs explains the paper’s three core values: free, global, and independent.

This is a lightly edited transcript of the June 29 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.

Perry Bacon: Welcome, everybody. This is Right Now on The New Republic. I’m your host, Perry Bacon. I’ve done a lot of episodes on this show about the media, but most of them have often been very critical—bemoaning layoffs, the decline of local news to some extent, news organizations trying to placate Trump in ways that worry me. The mergers have been troublesome.

But I’m excited today because we have a positive story about the news and a positive story about journalism. So I have Steve Sachs. He’s the managing director of The Guardian US. You probably have heard of The Guardian—it’s a well-known British paper, but they actually have a very strong US-focused edition and website that has great news about what’s happening in Washington, what’s happening in the country. So I want to talk about what The Guardian is doing here and what maybe other places can learn from it. Steve, welcome.

Steve Sachs: Thank you, Perry. Great to be here.

Bacon: So let me start from the beginning here, to tell people about the history. The Guardian started having a US operation a couple of decades ago. So talk about how that started and what the goal was initially.

Sachs: Yeah. At The Guardian, we’ve always had an editorial team here. But we started about a little more than 15 years ago saying, “Let’s expand into having an audience here and a business here.” And that was part of a strategy at The Guardian, really especially over the last 10 years, where we expanded in two key ways.

One was expanding outside the UK, and the second is expanding committing to being no-paywall, and then asking our audience to support us. Those were important strategic decisions, and expanding in the US was part of that overall strategy.

Bacon: And so let’s talk about pre-Trump—pre-Trump one, even. So as The Guardian opens in the US, you have staffers in New York and in DC and a little bit elsewhere. How big was the initial operation?

Sachs: We started with a team here. New York, DC, and California were our three main places originally. We were first in northern California. We then moved the bureau to southern California, to LA.

And honestly, Perry, in the first few years—first, say, five or six years—it was tough going. We lost a lot of money. We tried to figure out what our unique value is here, and it took us a while to figure out. And it wasn’t a straight line up. The news here—there’s lots of great players. It’s a crowded market.

And so for The Guardian to come in and figure out what is our value overall—what’s our, in business speak, what’s our unique value proposition—it took us a little while to figure out. And our business model took us a little while to figure out as well.

So we started there, but then really over the past, say, six or seven years, we really started to focus and understand what our opportunity is here. And as a result of that, we have grown significantly. We are now, typically in any given month, between 40 and 50 million uniques on our website and in our app, in total. That makes us bigger than the Wall Street Journal in the US.

And over the past five months, for the first time, we now have more page views and more unique visitors in the US than the Washington Post does. We have grown significantly as a result of the work that we’ve done. I could talk a little bit more about what exactly we did, but—

Bacon: We’ll come back to that.

Sachs: The headline is that we’re doing well, and more and more Americans are coming to us as their first choice for all kinds of news and journalism.

Bacon: Let me jump back. The initial goal—why did The Guardian decide to have more staff in the US? What was the initial impetus to start a US edition, or really focus on the US in the first place? Was it part of a worldwide expansion, or was there a specific need you all felt back in 2007?

Sachs: Yeah. So what happened was, 10 years ago—a little bit more than 10 years ago—we were losing a lot of money at The Guardian globally.

And people forget, with the great success of The New York Times—and I have so much respect for what they’ve done—people forget also that 15 years ago, The New York Times was really financially not on strong footing overall. They had to take a loan from a Mexican billionaire, a high-interest loan, in order to really help them shore up their financials.

The Guardian was similar. We were losing about £100 million a year. So that’s about, in today’s dollars, about $135 million. And we only had £700 million in an endowment. So that means we basically had seven years to live.

So what did we do? We decided that—at the time, we were the seventh-largest newspaper in the UK. And we decided that in order to change our economics and to also focus on a broader mission, we would target becoming one of the largest news organizations globally. And the US expansion was an important part of that.

The headline on that is that we are now, in 2026, the fifth-largest news organization globally by audience.

Bacon: CNN, New York Times, Guardian.

Sachs: So we have achieved our goal. New York Times, CNN, BBC, Guardian. So we’ve grown from the seventh-largest news organization in the UK to the fifth-largest news organization globally by audience.

We’ve also changed our economics. So 10 years ago, only 8 percent of our revenue was from outside the UK. Now it’s over 40 percent—it’s 41 percent of our revenue from outside the UK. And so just in 10 years, we successfully changed that. We are also now operating very well financially. And so that big loss that we had, we’ve changed as well.

Bacon: So I’m a journalist—I want to talk about journalism and the stories themselves for a little bit right now. What I found was, in 2017, during that first Trump period, the reason I started reading The Guardian more was, one, I liked the perspective that was international. It wasn’t so grounded in the US, and it helped me see the world a little bit broader, the way you all covered it.

And two, I felt like there was a little more directness about what Trump was doing. Sometimes I worried that NPR, The Times, The Post would do what I think of as a sort of both sides, and not honestly say what he was actually doing and the alarming radicalism. But how do you see that? What was the—how did the Trump era affect what you all did when he was first in office?

Sachs: It’s really interesting to hear what you found valuable for us back in 2017. I would summarize what you said as: we have more of a global perspective.

Whereas many news organizations in the US have more of an American filter. And also what you said was, we can report as is—so that’s really more of an independent view. And that’s exactly right.

A few years ago—when Betsy Reed, our editor, and I started, we both started three and a half years ago, within about a month of each other—one of the first things we did is we wanted to understand what our value proposition is in the US. And there was a lot of debate at the time about what it might be.

So we commissioned research. We did very sophisticated quantitative research with over 3,000 people in the US. They all took a 45-minute in-depth survey. And we did it—those 3,000 people represent that there are about 200 million people in the US who come to digital news every month.

And we wanted to understand what was The Guardian’s value proposition to those 200 million........

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