Sustainability report 2010 1 Sustainability report

Sustainability report 20101

We need to meet the challenge of keeping dear our core values, while navigating the rapid and constant changes in the industry

It has been the best of years, the worst of years.

Our independent liberal journal-ism is now reaching more people around the world than ever before. Advances in technology mean we are able not only to increasingly collaborate with our readers and

users, but also tell stories in more innova-tive and engaging ways.

At the same time, this technological revolution, coupled with the worst media recession in living memory, has under-mined Guardian News & Media’s (GNM) business model and necessitated deep and painful cuts that have shaken the culture of the organisation.

The big question throughout this con-stant and rapid period of change is how can the Guardian and Observer keep dear to our core values? This applies not only to our journalism, but also in the way we treat our other stakeholders, such as our staff and suppliers, as well as minimising the social, environmental and economic impacts of our business operations.

The answer to that is – in principle – very simple. Our values do not reside in any one individual or in any single company policy. As CP Scott, our great former editor of 57 years, made clear in his leader column cel-ebrating the centenary of the Manchester Guardian in 1921, that the character of the Guardian is based on “the slow deposit of past actions and ideals”.

So beyond all else, we always need to keep in our mind’s eye our core purpose of challenging the status quo, holding power to account and inspiring our readers and users to take action, in pursuit of the ulti-mate goal of creating a sustainable world.

Editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger believes the best path to achieving that is to open ourselves up, meaning our journalism should be “of” the web, rather than merely “on” the web.

Rather than putting up paywalls that exclude most people, this means becom-ing a wide and deep channel through which can flow the constant river of news, comment, knowledge, ideas and data. But it is easy to forget that technology is an enabler of change rather than the change itself, and the Guardian’s key role is to help our readers and users navigate their way through this torrent of information, rather than see them being swept away by it.

Information is neutral in the sense that it can just as easily act to dampen engage-

Sustainability report: Introduction

ment as it can to spur it. Most of us have had the experience of too much choice leading to paralysis.

So it is vital our editorial staff continue to do what they have always done so bril-liantly; sift through all the information, know which experts to turn to, ask the difficult questions, and present news, data and comment in a way that informs, educates and influences.

What has dramatically shifted is the old model of giving our readers news and comment, yet only involving them by cor-ralling a few of their responses into the readers’ letters section of the paper.

We now have the capacity and the desire to interact with our web users in numerous ways, and are putting this at the heart of all we do. This mutualisation means we will lead, but we will also follow.

This deep engagement with our most important stakeholder represents what corporate responsibility is all about. It contrasts with the majority of company engagement programmes, which can often look like a hollow and one-dimensional exercise, with views solicited in safe and controlled environments but rarely acted upon.

Patrick Butler, our society editor, writes in the editorial section of this report of how mutualised media represents the most profound – and in many ways liber-ating – development in his 20 years of jour-nalism: “Interactive digital technology has massively expanded our pool of expertise by enabling the authentic, unmediated voices of social workers, doctors, nurses, teachers, university lecturers – as well as students, patients and other users of pub-lic services – to emerge.

It’s changed what we publish, the way we publish and how we gather information and intelligence.”

Just a decade ago, there was a wave of optimism as we entered the 21st century. That hope has largely dissipated against the backdrop of the existential crisis facing our world. There is not only the enormous danger of climate change but several other inter-connected crises also to deal with, such as the rapid loss of biodiversity, water scarcity, resource over-use and growing social injustice to name just a few.

There is no possibility of mitigating, never mind solving, these problems in silos. They are global issues that need glo-bal answers and the web offers perhaps our best chance of creating the collaboration

and participation that are essential to find-ing solutions.

The Guardian can with pride highlight many examples in the past year of how we have sought to capture this opportunity; whether it is supporting the 10:10 cam-paign to reduce emissions in the UK, or the bringing together of 56 news organisations from around the world to agree a joint leader column on the eve of the Copenha-gen climate change conference.

One particular investigation we believe is particularly worth highlighting is our exposure of oil trader Trafigura in the poi-soning of 30,000 people in Africa, despite the company’s attempt to gag us with a superinjunction. This only proved possi-ble through the participation of the Twit-ter community and other media organisa-tions around the world.

This story, which we report on in depth in this audit, epitomises how we seek to live our values, which were laid down by our former great editor CP Scott in his leader column celebrating the Manches-ter Guardian’s centenary in 1921; “honesty, cleanness [integrity], courage, fairness, a sense of duty to the reader and the com-munity.”

We produce this independently verified annual report because it helps remind us that our values can lose their vitality over time unless they are keenly understood, made relevant to current times and are actively measured and reported on.

It is also a way of showing our many stakeholders where we have excelled and where we have fallen short. By creating an interactive reporting website at guardian.co.uk/sustainability, we have become the first company in the world to create a sys-tem of ongoing auditing of our perform-ance across all parts of the business.

It would be hypocritical to have a two-way dialogue in our editorial coverage without also encouraging this in the way we run our business. Through this media and technological revolution, it is impor-tant to take note of Liz Forgan, the chair of our owners the Scott Trust, who said that at a time when everything is changing, it is important to know what should remain the same.

The Guardian was created to rally the forces of liberalism against the gaping social injustices that were created as a result of the industrial revolution.

During that period, the Manchester Guardian, at its peak sold a mere 50,000


copies, virtually all of them within a 20-mile radius of Manchester, but had an influence on events around the world because of the trust in its coverage.

Just think how the Guardian and Observer can contribute to the creation of a just and equitable society with more than 35 million readers and browsers accessing our papers and website every month, from around the world.

Rusbridger says: “Scott would, I think, have been intensely intrigued to know that the paper he edited for so long and in whose name a family trust was established to continue the spirit of the Guardian – was so openly available and read around the world.

That it was becoming as influential in Beijing and Washington as in Paris or Delhi. That its reporting could change the minds of governments, inspire thinking, defy censorship, give a voice to the power-less and previously voiceless.”


The hopes and aspirations we have as a pioneering ethical company and major news organisation

Sustainability visionOur vision is to be a leader on sustainabil-ity within the media industry. Through our editorial coverage and business activi-ties, we will demonstrate to readers, staff, advertisers, suppliers and our communi-ties that Guardian News & Media is com-mitted to enhancing society’s ability to build a sustainable future.

Our long-term ambition is to be carbon positive – going beyond carbon neutral and positively affecting climate change. We aim to do this by influencing individu-als, companies and governments as well as setting challenging targets in operations we directly control.

EditorialClearly our greatest impact comes from informing and influencing our global audi-ence. We will therefore build on our posi-tion as a recognised leader in the reporting of environmental and social justice issues, by providing the most comprehensive news coverage on subjects such as climate change, environmental degradation and social inequality.

These topics will be explored from the social, economic, political and scientific perspectives, both nationally and glo-bally.

We will promote public debate and har-ness the power of our readers and users by creating online tools and projects that give them the opportunity to share knowledge and ideas, as well as encouraging them to make a difference, both as individuals and within their communities.

Social justice has always been at the heart of our journalism and we will con-sistently give a voice to disadvantaged communities around the world most affected by climate change.

CommercialGNM’s reputation puts us in a strong posi-tion to benefit from the growing trend in businesses moving towards a more sus-tainable future. We will support our large existing clients in this endeavour as well as enable small and emerging companies to develop their markets.

We recognise that tensions can arise between our need for advertising rev-enues to sustain our business and being a medium for promoting consumption. Our role is neither to hector our readers nor to censor on their behalf. Our editorial cover-age informs and influences our audience

GNM’s vision for sustainability

in their choices.We will work with our readers and users

to gain a deeper understanding of what products and services they want in this area, and use this knowledge to engage with our advertisers and sponsors on the issue of sustainability.

OperationalOur offices and print sites will be of the highest environmental standards and we commit to minimising waste and maxim-ising both efficiency and recycling. We will avoid unnecessary energy use, reduce our energy consumption where possible, use renewables and only offset emissions where there are no real alternatives.

Sustainability will be at the heart of our procurement processes as we recognise that our suppliers represent a key part of our operational impact. We will consist-ently increase the amount of recycled and certified virgin newsprint in our products and will work across the industry to mini-mise the ecological footprint of paper sup-ply and newspaper distribution.

PeopleWe will empower and inspire everyone who works at GNM to act by encouraging sustainable behaviour. We will achieve this through leadership, raising awareness and incentives. By the time we move to our new offices in King’s Cross [completed in December 2008], our working culture will aim to minimise waste and we will make it easy for all of us to act responsibly. We will also work in partnership with our local and global communities to address their social and environmental needs, by highlighting the issues and providing volunteering, resources and funding.


GNM aims encompass all activities across the company, supported by an employee engagement programme

Core to the success of GNM’s journey towards sustainability has been the development of an integrated strategy that encompasses all depart-ments and activities, and is supported by a

company-wide employee engagement programme.

A survey in 2009 showed that nearly 90% of our newspaper readers and more than three-quarters of our web users believe it is important GNM has such a broad strategy in place.

The strategy is designed so that success in one area of the business spurs changes in other departments. For example, the editorial reputation we have gained from development of one of the world’s lead-ing environment websites has driven com-mercial innovation through the creation of the Green Ad network and Guardian Sustainable Business. Another is that the 10:10 editorial campaign was the catalyst for us to set a target of reducing our own carbon footprint by a tenth in 2010.

The GNM board reviewed the strategy in June 2010 to build on the successes of previous years, while also recognising that a sharp reduction in staff means we have to prioritise our activities more effectively.

The company had set nine key objec-tives and associated targets in the financial year ending March 2010. Please go to our section on targets to see how we believe we fared.

For the current financial year we have added a specific editorial objective. While sustainability in all its myriad forms, from social justice to the environment, is already at the heart of our editorial coverage, it was felt more could be done to review our coverage of sustainability-related issues in specialist areas, ranging from fashion and travel, to sports and the arts.

The objectives and targets cover six main areas; governance, commercial and finance, editorial, operations and stakeholders. We have worked with our colleagues at parent company Guardian Media Group to ensure our ambitions tie-in neatly with their Power of 10 sustain-ability vision and objectives.

Governance• Ensure new governance structure is working effectively across GNM.• Regular meetings of the sustainability

Developing our integrated business strategy

leadership group of directors.• Develop a clearer understanding of the journey towards our vision to be carbon positive.• Six-monthly presentation and discus-sion of sustainability issues at the full board.• Regular reporting to GMG on their sustainability-related Power of 10’ objec-tives.• Bedding in the new sustainable devel-opment department structure.• Support GMG on implementing its sus-tainability visioning.• Use our internal expertise to support GMG in implementing its 2012 objec-tives.• Effectively communicate the Power of 10 internally and what actions GNM is tak-ing to realise the ambitions.• Directors’ involvement in continual improvement: ensure directors have clear, measurable personal objectives and report on progress quarterly.• Redefine the role of departmental sus-tainability advocates to support directors in identifying and achieving their sustain-ability objectives.

Commercial and finance• Integrate sustainability into commercial and financial decision-making and report-ing.• Further increase the share of environ-mental and ethical revenues and deepen relationships with key clients.• Create a “dashboard” in collaboration with GMG to effectively measure progress on sustainability objectives.• Review whether sustainability is being embedded effectively into investment decisions.

Editorial• Work with editorial departments to explore how they can more effectively incorporate sustainability into their activi-ties.• Meet with individual heads of depart-ments to understand their thinking around sustainability and see how they could develop content ideas and reduce their environmental impacts.

Operational performance• Develop carbon footprint reduction measures and long-term carbon positive strategy.• We will define what carbon positive

means for our operations and set clear goals and targets in order to bring the vision a step closer.• Innovate on technology and climate change, including meeting our commit-ment to the 10:10 campaign.• Embed sustainability in procurement company-wide.• Create a system for ensuring sustain-ability related expertise developed by procurement department is shared across the business.• Ensure that any new suppliers of out-sourced activities, such as technology and Creative, embed key targets and reporting on sustainability impacts.• Increase the sustainability of our proc-esses and services.• Ensure we meet 2009/10 targets that were not met as a result of the restructur-ing, such as reducing the impacts of our supplements and creating green supplier lists for events.

Stakeholders• Increase staff awareness and engage-ment on sustainability.• Review effectiveness of employee engagement activities and plan future programme.• Embed diversity and inclusiveness into our editorial content and business behav-iours and actions.• Review and improve internal communi-cations strategy.• Evaluate effectiveness of our commu-nity programme and integrate it into staff development procedures and appraisals.• Strengthen assurance for stakeholders and develop online reporting.• Develop online engagement tools for stakeholders such as open threads/ques-tionnaires.• Embed learnings from the collaboration work with media companies from across the world, as part of the Global Reporting Initiative media sector supplement.


Responses in seperate staff and reader’s surveys found as a company we were doing well, but could do better

It is important to know whether our key stakeholders feel that we are living up to our values.

Over the past 18 months, we have carried out three separate surveys that have asked this question of our staff as well as our readers and users.

Perhaps most interesting was the inclu-siveness survey carried out in the Spring of 2010, which asked whether senior manag-ers and colleagues lived up to the values laid down by our great former editor CP Scott in a leader article celebrating the cen-tenary of the Guardian in 1921.

The survey was held at a low ebb in the company’s fortunes, given there had been two recent rounds of redundancies and significant uncertainty for staff as roles and responsibilities were shifting. Perhaps not surprisingly, staff gave higher scores for how they and their colleagues live the values, but considering the stress the com-pany was under, senior managers received relatively strong acknowledgement.

The highest score in the survey was the 85% of staff who felt they and their col-leagues have “integrity” and a “sense of duty” in the way they work on a day-to-day basis.

By far the lowest score for senior man-agers was over the question of whether they live up to our value of “fairness”. Just over half thought they do, compared with three-quarters who think they themselves and their colleagues operate in a fair way.

A summary of some of the scores:I/colleagues live these Scott Trust values on a day-to-day basis:

• Integrity 85%• Sense of Duty 85%• Honesty 83%• Courage 79%• Fairness 75%

Senior management live the Scott Trust values on a day-to-day basis:• Sense of duty 72%• Courage 67%• Integrity 64%• Honesty 62%• Fairness 52%

In the employee survey carried out in the Autumn of 2009, staff were asked a single question around this issue; whether GNM as an organisation lives up the Scott Trust

Are we really living our values?

values.There was a more positive score of 58%,

compared with 54% in 2008, although there was a higher percentage, 21%, who actively disagree.

We also ask nearly 3,000 readers and web users annually a series of questions, including their views on how well our editorial content reflects our core values. In our last survey, around 90% said they believe that the mission of our owner the Scott Trust to operate quality newspapers/news sources free from party affiliation remaining faithful to the liberal tradition, is reflected in our content.


There has been positive progress, as well as setbacks in GNM’s quest to be a leader in sustainability within the media industry

The last year has seen some great strides forward, as well as some setbacks in the sustainability govern-ance structure at Guard-ian News & Media.

On the positive side, the board has re-iterated

that living our values is one of the core objectives of the company.

The directors have also agreed that our independent auditors Two Tomorrows will review progress on our targets at six-monthly intervals, rather than just annu-ally. Another major step forward has been the approval of a sustainability vision and strategy by our parent company Guardian Media Group.

There has traditionally been a level of disquiet at GNM, that while it was seek-ing to be a leader in sustainability within the media industry, it could not truly achieve that aim if the rest of the group’s businesses did not also have clear public goals. While there were centres of excel-lence within other parts of GMG, the board did not have an integrated approach or a way of measuring progress.

The GMG vision, branded as the Power of 10, commits the group to 10 areas of change, ranging from environmental management and ethical procurement to employee and community engagement.

To ensure progress is properly moni-tored, GMG has a sustainability champion on the board and a regular reporting proc-ess. Each business within the group is also required to have a sustainability govern-ance system in place.

One of the biggest setbacks within GNM’s own governance structure has been delays in the agreed setting of board objectives around social, environmental and economic impacts, caused in part by the restructuring within the company. An agreement had been reached in 2008, in which each director would have personal objectives based on achieving the com-pany’s sustainability strategy. However, its introduction was initially delayed, and then got caught up in the company restructuring programme, which has seen the number of directors reduced from 16 to 10, and responsibilities shift within the business.

With the new board in place, each direc-tor now does have at least one sustaina-bility objective for the year ending March 2011 and this is linked to their bonus.

Sustainability report: governance

The implementation of the com-pany sustainability strategy was further impeded by changes within the sustain-able development team at GNM. The loss of sustainability advocates within some departments as a result of the company’s redundancy programme. As a result, an independent consultancy was asked to look at the governance structure of sus-tainability and their recommendations were implemented in June 2010.

The new system sees the operations director Derek Gannon continue in his role as board sustainability champion. He chairs a monthly meeting of the sustain-ability leadership group, which consists of all the commercial directors as well as Jo Confino, executive editor (sustainability and external engagement), who repre-sents the editorial departments.

Sustainability strategy implementation now comes under the umbrella of Paula Tsung, whose role is head of workplace and sustainability. There are two full-time specialist roles within the sustain-able development team; a sustainability manager and an environmental manager. They will be supported by three internal consultants, one representing editorial and the other two from the main commer-cial business-to-consumer and business-to-business departments.

The organisation of advocates, or cham-pions, is also being refreshed. Their role was made difficult, not only because some directors had not set their own objectives, but also because they had no official job description and were in some cases expected to perform their role unofficially on top of their normal day jobs. Of course, any effective governance system relies on an understanding of what sustainability means for the company in all its various departments.

A weakness was noted in the 2008 employee survey, which showed that a fairly large proportion of staff did not have an in-depth understanding of our sustain-ability vision or how to integrate it into their daily working lives.

To rectify this, the sustainable develop-ment team organised presentations to all commercial and operational departments during 2009, as well as sustainability events for all staff. Plans to take the road-show to the main editorial heads of depart-ment meeting were delayed because there were more pressing agenda items.

This staff engagement programme has had a marked impact, with the 2009 employee survey showing a dramatic uplift in the scores on sustainability. One of the lowest scores in the entire 2008 sur-vey had been the response to the question of whether the Guardian “encourages me to take an active part in reducing my envi-ronmental impact at work”.

The latest survey, released in November 2009, shows that the response to this ques-tion scored the biggest improvement, with 65% of staff now believing the Guardian does encourage them. Furthermore, the report shows that 86% of staff are aware of the company’s sustainability vision, one of the highest scores in the survey, 72% believe it has effective environmen-tal practices in place and that 83% believe the Guardian is committed to supporting our local and global communities through providing volunteering, resources and funding.

GNM managing director Tim Brooks highlighted these improvements in a blog to staff: “Last time you told us you weren’t really sure what our policies and vision were, and you weren’t sure how to contribute and participate. These scores are now high – in some areas, really very high.”


Revealing our successes and failures, strengths and weaknesses across the business

We have brought together the 2009/10 objec-tives and tar-gets that were set across the business and highlight suc-

cesses and failures. We also present the targets we have set for the current finan-cial/calendar year.

Governance• Ensure new governance structure is working effectively across GNM.• Support Guardian Media Group on implementing its sustainability vision-ing.• Increase Directors’ involvement in con-tinual improvement.Operational performance• Develop carbon footprint reduction measures and long-term carbon positive strategy.• Embed sustainability in procurement, company-wide.• Increase the sustainability of our proc-esses, products and services.

StakeholdersIncrease staff awareness and engagement on sustainability.

Strengthen assurance for stakeholders and develop online reporting.

Given that GNM went through such tur-bulence during the financial year ending March 2010, we feel that overall we made strong progress on the key objectives.

Highlights were supporting our par-ent company Guardian Media Group in the creation of a sustainability vision and strategy, signing up as a business to the 10:10 campaign and launching our inter-active sustainability reporting website.

External consultants supported the development of a sustainable procure-ment strategy. A great deal of effort went into understanding the carbon footprint of our technology and paper purchasing. We also created new business ventures, such as Guardian Sustainable Business, which will improve the sustainability of our products and services.

We also increased staff awareness and engagement with a series of events and better internal communications. This resulted in sharply improved scores in our staff survey on sustainability-related issues.

Our company targets and objectives

Not everything was a success, how-ever. The major restructuring and slim-ming down of the business meant that our governance structure was weakened and plans for directors to have their own personal sustainability objectives were delayed. However, by 2010 a new govern-ance structure was formalised and being implemented.

Also some targets (see below) were not met because of the changes in depart-mental structures and the redundancy programme.

TargetsWe use a star rating to score how well we have done on the targets we set annually.

No progress = 0 starsModest progress = ★Good progress = ★★Target completed = ★★★

Within this section we report on our 2009/10 targets and include new ones for 2010-11. The targets for the current finan-cial year do not cover all areas within the business, as some departments will be looking this year to set objectives. It is hoped that by June 2011, each department will have developed its own sustainability targets and action plans that are incorpo-rated within overall department objec-tives.

Ad department1) To increase the department’s share of green and ethical revenue from 4% in 2009 to 7% in 2010. Rating: ★★By the end of 09-10 financial year, the aver-age monthly environmental and ethical share has increased to 5.4%.

2) To increase the Green Ad Network from 4.6m monthly ad impressions to 6.9m.Rating: ★★★ The combined ad impressions from the green ad network and recently launched Diversity ad network total impressions total 9.8m.

However, over the past year we have changed the network strategy. We have shifted from an emphasis on growing traf-fic, to tracking revenue.

3) To grow our Ventures green and ethical revenues from 9% in 2009 to 12% in 2010.Rating: ★★

Branded products and services – formerly known as Ventures – green and ethical rev-enues have averaged a 9% share for the last financial year. However, there were many months when share exceeded its target of 12%.

4) To Launch a more in-depth green jobs site.Rating: ★★★In December 09 we successfully re-launched the Environmental and Sustain-ability jobs site.

5) To continue to use eco:metrics and monitor the CO2 dataRating: ★★★The amount of CO2 emitted from all booked campaigns totals more than 1,000 tonnes. This is captured in the total carbon footprint of GNM.

Marketing 2009-106) Establish sustainability evaluations and environmental tracking of marketing projectsRating: 0 starsA restructuring of the marketing depart-ment meant that it has not met its target.

Professional 2009-107) Further greening of events creating a preferred list of our event suppliers; allo-cating a fixed amount per event to our CO2 partners.Rating: ★★Rather than offset emissions from its events, the department allocated £800 to each of GNM’s three carbon partners – Con-verging World, Sandbag and Sea Change – over the financial year.

8) Further developing commercial oppor-tunities for supplements and digital con-tent.Rating: ★★★Within Guardian Business & Professional there has been a significant increase in sustainability-related content with large campaigns. The two most significant are Carbon Trust’s association with Clean Tech and the ongoing work the Digital Agency have been doing in building EDF’s sustainability education resources. Guard-ian Sustainable Business was also recently launched.

9) Sustainable procurement, using pre-ferred green suppliers for printing of pub-


lications.Rating: 0 starsThis target has been affected by the restructure and has therefore been unable to create the list.

10) Launch GP community project to engage and inform more GP staff with val-ues and our local community.Rating: 0 starsThe timing of the restructuring of depart-ments at GNM meant that we were unable to deliver this target.

Consumer media 2010-11• To increase the advertising depart-ment’s share of green and ethical revenue from 5% in 2010 to 7% in 2011.• To grow revenues on across the green and diversity ad networks by 93% in the next financial year.• To grow our Branded products and serv-ices green and ethical revenues from 9% in 2010 to 12% in 2011.• To measure the CO2 of GNM’s marketing activity (initially using eco:metrics).• For Consumer Media Directors to each have sustainability objectives.

Professional 2010-121. Increase by 50% environment revenues this year (£520,000 to £780,000) which were last year 14.8% of total revenues.2. Launch GP community project to engage and inform more GP staff with values and our local community.3. Create working group to identify oppor-tunities and actions to contribute to sus-tainability vision in Business and Profes-sional.

People 2009-101. Appraisals; 80% commercial and 25% editorial to be appraised by December 09. Rating: ★★

2. Improve scores in employee survey relating to career progression, transpar-ency of pay and fair recruitment. Rating: ★

2010-111. Achieve 90% appraisal completion rates for Commercial staff and 40% appraisal rates for editorial staff by December 2010.

2. Incorporate GNM’s sustainability goals

into the induction programme for all new staff.

3. Communicate to staff regularly regard-ing actions taken to improve key concerns raised in the staff survey with a view to improving staff perceptions in these areas (although we won’t be doing another sur-vey until mid-2011).

3. Include the demonstrating of values and volunteering into appraisals system.

Diversity 2009-101. New management process for diversity across the business up and runningRating: ★★★

2. Set measurable targets against business critical objectivesRating: ★★★

3. Deliver on the 32 recommended actions for equality and diversity.Rating: 0 stars

These became redundant with the new diversity objectives and focus on an embedded approach to Diversity across the organisation, rather than just the nar-row focus of recruitment.

Objectives 2010-111. Increase the diversity of our UK users.Targets:

• Undertake four minority media confer-ences covering the main equality strands, to feed into editorial how better to rep-resent these communities in an accurate and fair way, resulting in a deeper under-standing of diverse communities of Britain today.• Undertake two minority writers work-shops that lead to at least 10 articles being commissioned from new minority writers by March 2011.• Undertake an audit of the editorial com-mission process, measuring the number of new contributors by each equality strand, leading to setting a percentage target of freelance commissions being given to “new and diverse voices”.• Undertake initiatives from the Diver-sity Ambassador Programme that creates a two-way dialogue between minority group leaders and their communities, and GNM. These are:1. A consultation thinktank with GNM

and minority groups to develop a way to consult and hear from minority communi-ties about our editorial coverage affecting them. And also creating a channel for new stories “by” and “on” minority communi-ties.2. Meet the journalist session.3. Guidance for submitting stories/pitches.4. Provide ambassadors with named con-tacts in editorial, by area of interest.5. Increasing our community volunteer programme by 50%.6. Internal lunch and learn sessions with minority organisations.7. Jobs and career support and information for minority communities.8. Strengthen our ability to create distinc-tive output and business services through diversity.

• Further grow our diversity advertise-ment network revenue and organisations by a further 30% by March 2011.• Increase the diversity of the workforce including the board and head’s of depart-ments.• Promote all jobs, positive action schemes, and bursary programmes through the new network of diversity ambassadors, to cast our net as wide and far as possible to capture a diverse talent base pool to recruit from.• Develop internal initiatives to nurture talent from minority backgrounds into senior positions.• Build diversity measures into perform-ance management.• Build diversity component into appraisal systems across the business that hold sen-ior management to account on what has been achieved around diversity within respective GNM business areas.• Build diversity component into com-mercial pay bonus schemes.• Improve the culture of the organisation to be more inclusive.• Set up a steering group of senior man-agement to act on findings of the June 2010 staff inclusivity survey.• Set key targets, measurable outcomes, and measure for effectiveness for the five objectives of inclusion at GNM (identified from the June 2010 senior management workshop) of leadership, transparency, opportunity, communication and cul-ture.


OperationalTargets 2009-10• Paper sourcingIncrease certified virgin paper content from 70% to 90% for magazine paper by 2012.Rating: ★★★80.5% achieved for GMG overall 2009-2010 and 91.7% for GNM.

• Recycled levels for newsprint to be held at 80% or above.Rating: ★★★77.6% achieved for GMG overall 2009-2010 and 98.2% for GNM.

• Develop our carbon footprintEstablish quarterly reporting on our car-bon footprintRating: ★★★This is now done covering energy use at GNM offices and print centres and busi-ness travel.The Guardian Print Centres started monthly CO2 per copy reporting in 2009.

• Measure the carbon footprint of the paper we purchase.Rating: ★★★Monthly reporting started April, 2009. 0.37 tonnes CO2 per tonne of paper 2009-2010.

• Establish the carbon footprint of our technology infrastructure.Rating: ★★★Done for the IT infrastructure at GNM head office – servers and desktops.

• Establish the carbon footprint of our wholesale and retail distribution.Rating: ★

• Develop carbon reduction measures – establish carbon reduction plans for offices.Rating: ★★

• Establish carbon reduction plans for print sites.Rating: ★★Review and establish policy and carbon reduction plans for company cars and travel.Rating: 0 stars.

• Develop long-term carbon strategy. Define what carbon positive means for our business and develop a carbon posi-

tive road map by 2010.Rating: ★Interviews and a workshop done with GNM commercial directors on carbon positive with support from Forum for the Future

• Embed sustainability in procurement and supply-chain management, company-wide.

Review and revise central procurement procedures on sustainability, identify pri-ority areas for sustainable procurement.Rating: ★★An external review was done of central procurement processes and procedures in 2009. Sustainability has been highly integrated in GNM’s ongoing technology outsourcing process. Sustainability has been integrated into central procurement review and planning 2010.

• Establish good practice on sustainable procurement company-wide.Rating: ★

• Review environmental performance of third-party print sites.

Rating: 0 stars

• Develop third party supplier manage-ment training for staff including sustain-ability.Rating: 0 stars,

• Increase the sustainability of our prod-ucts, processes and services. Achieve chain-of-custody certification for maga-zines.Rating: ★★★PEFC certification achieved for Guardian Saturday magazine and Observer maga-zine.

• Establish understanding of impacts of promotional supplements and identify improvement measures.0 stars

• Eliminate the use of harmful chemicals were possible.Rating: ★★VOCs eliminated from press-cleaning at the print centres.

• Increase resource efficiency.Rating: ★★33% water savings at GPC Manchester.

• Increase waste prevention and improve waste managementRating: ★

2010-11 targets.

• 10% reduction in CO2 generated by energy use and travel per £100,000 of turnover 2010-2011 compared with 2009-2010.• 10% in CO2 per tonne of newsprint sup-plied.• Increase office waste recycling from 45% to 66%.• Achieve certification to the Carbon Trust Standard for all GNM offices and both print centres.• Achieve ISO 14001 certification for the Guardian print centre in Manchester.


By approaching the annual Living our Values study as a piece of journalism we bring a critical eye to our workings

There is a saying that we are always blinded to ourselves.

So when we report on our social, environmental and economic impacts, it is crucial that we know the issues that our stake-

holders find important, rather than just write about what we think is relevant.

Some of the issues, of course, are obvi-ous. For example, we know our readers and users are most interested in our con-tent; what is the purpose behind what we write; how we make editorial decisions; what safeguards do we have in place and how we interact with them.

It’s also worth pointing out that we approach the report itself as a journalistic exercise, and apply the same questioning mind that we do to all our stories. In fact, for all key sections, editorial staff inter-view senior managers.

This means that we look at the issues as an outsider to the organisation, rather than from the perspective of a corporate responsibility department.

More than this, we believe we apply our core values of “honesty, cleanness [integ-rity], courage, fairness, a sense of duty to the reader and the community”.

In the context of this report, that means being transparent about our failures as well as our successes. It also means that unlike other companies’ reports, Living our Val-ues does not go through any committee structure that waters down the contents.

It is edited by executive editor Jo Con-fino and goes to relevant directors only for final fact and sense checking. “In the eight years that we have been producing the report, no editorial or commercial director has ever requested that anything gets cut out because it may prove embarrassing or could damage our brand.” says Confino

We start from the point that we are essentially guided by the purpose of our sole owners, the Scott Trust, which is to ensure that the Guardian is an independ-ent quality newspaper in the liberal tradi-tion.

So the first thing we want to be able to show our owners and other stakeholders is whether we live up to this ideal. One of the core aspects of being “liberal” is to ensure that our local and global societies are based on the principle of social justice. This is why a large part of the editorial sec-tion of the Living our Values report is dedi-

Outsiders’ view gives us insight to improve internal practices

cated to this area.On the editorial side, we are strongly

influenced by consistent survey results over the past few years that national news-paper journalism is largely mistrusted. We believe in the role of the press as the “fourth estate,” one of the key pillars in upholding a healthy democratic society. It becomes harder to discharge this respon-sibility if we are not trusted.

This is why we include the various assurance methods we use at the Guard-ian, ranging from our readers’ editors on the Guardian and Observer, to our style guide and editorial code of conduct, which goes beyond the guidelines of the Press Complaints Commission.

One of the most effective ways that the press achieves this is by holding those in power to account and also bringing hidden information to light. To show how we do this, the Living our Values report includes case studies of recent investigations, which go far beyond normal day-to-day reporting, such as the Trafigura investiga-tion in this year’s report.

While content may be king, we also rec-ognise the importance of reporting on how we operate as a company.

We ask both our key unions, the National Union of Journalists and Unite, to write a commentary for the sustainability report to ensure that they are able to put across their point of view.

On the employee side, our main tool for gathering feedback from staff is our annual employee survey, the results of which are published on our intranet, as well as in our sustainability report. We also report back to staff regularly on what is being done about areas of weakness, such as transpar-ency of pay and career progression.

The staff survey has shown consistently that inclusiveness is an area of weakness for GNM, so in 2010 we carried out a spe-cific survey around this issue, the results of which are published in the report.

To help us understand what our read-ers think about our sustainability report-ing in general, and our editorial coverage in particular, we conduct an annual survey of around 3,000 of our newspaper readers and website users. All the data from this is included within our website and fed back to editorial staff.

GNM is also one of the founding mem-bers of the Media CSR Forum, an industry group consisting of many of the key media companies in the UK, including the BBC,

Pearson, ITV, Trinity Mirror, Channel Four and News International.

We have financially supported two major stakeholder engagement programmes by the Forum to ensure we are reporting on the issues that matter.

The first one was carried out by KPMG in 2003 and this was followed up in 2008 by a stakeholder survey organised by the CSR consultants Acona, which helps manage the Forum activities.

We ensure that we report on the key issues identified within these reports. Those issues that relate specifically to the media industry include transparent and responsible editorial policies, diversity of output, freedom of expression, promotion of sustainable development and trans-parent ownership. Issues raised that are common to other sectors include supply chain integrity, community investment and environmental management.

With our sustainability reporting now on the web, we for the first time this year asked our stakeholders in a blogpost what they wanted to see in this report, and ensured that key issues they identified were included.

We also open up all stories and blogposts for comments and seek back the views of our users. We also initiate debates, such as whether our ambition to be environmen-tally regenerative makes sense of not.

Beyond all this, the Guardian is an active member of the Global Reporting Initiative’s media sector supplement. We are working with other media companies from all over the world, alongside NGOs and labour unions, to devise a set of com-mon global reporting rules for the media industry. While the report will not be published until the summer of 2011, the Guardian is already integrating the learn-ings into the Living our Values reporting process, particularly around how GNM can measure its brainprint.


The following is the text of Two Tomorrows’ independent assurance statement to the Guardian’s stakeholders

Guardian News & Media is having to adapt to fundamental changes in technology and the impacts of the worst media recession in at least a generation.

The company has responded by cut-ting costs and restructuring its activities. The challenge has been to demonstrate its values through this period, even though it has not been able to take its normal con-sensual approach and has been challenged on some of its decisions by the two main unions who represent staff.

It is not surprising that given the scale of changes, that progress on the sustainabil-ity programme has stalled in some areas. It is nevertheless notable that manage-ment remains committed to delivering a sustainability programme and ensuring the values of the Scott Trust are embed-ded within the organisation. Management has also recognised that staff morale is low following the restructuring and re-engage-ment is therefore a priority for this year.

The governance arrangements for sus-tainability are being adjusted following the significant changes throughout the business. It will be important to clarify the roles and responsibilities of the sus-tainability leadership group, made up of directors, the sustainability department and departmental advocates (champions), to ensure a coherent approach to deliver-ing the sustainability strategy. Strong lead-ership is needed from the directors if it is to be achieved.

Sustainability vision and strategyWe are pleased to see that the sustain-ability strategy has been reviewed by the board and extended to include embedding sustainability into wider editorial teams – an important step given the Guardian’s recognition of the relative significance of editorial for its overall impact.

The commitment to regular board reporting by directors is another step for-ward. The launch of the Guardian Media Group’s “Power of 10” sustainability vision, which draws on the Guardian’s experience, also goes a long way to addressing our pre-vious comment concerns about Guardian Media Group’s commitment.

To support the strategy, the sustain-ability leadership group now have per-sonal objectives around sustainability.

Auditor’s report: adapting to fundamental change

However, further work is needed to align their objectives more clearly with the strategy and to set clear metrics to meas-ure progress, especially given the delay in this process from 2009. Moving forwards, sustainability targets should be developed to support the strategy, along with a clear implementation plan.

Resources to deliver objectives are tighter this year given the loss of almost 300 staff. It will be even more important that sustainability objectives for each department are clear and focused to ensure they are deliverable.

EditorialThe main strength of the Guardian’s sus-tainability influence is through its out-standing environmental and social justice content. But what of the rest of its coverage with less obvious sustainability connec-tions: Sport, Fashion, Travel, Motoring, Business, Money? Is this content living the values? And if so, how can we tell?

This is not just about measuring the number of sustainability articles (see our recent postings on the Guardian’s sustain-ability blog), but also about the way the department considers sustainability in the cut and thrust of daily news and current affairs.

To assess this, we interviewed a sam-ple of three editorial departments: Travel, Fashion and Society. It was encouraging to see that all three demonstrated an appre-ciation of the key sustainability issues relating to their area. We saw evidence that sustainability was being taken into account when choosing content and in the viewpoint taken on specific issues.

Like most editorial newsrooms, the approach by most desk editors is neither systematic nor consistent and we recog-nise that setting targets is not an appro-priate approach. At the same time, we recommend that the Guardian engages further with the wider editorial teams on embedding sustainability more deeply, as the departments interviewed tend to respond to readers concerns, rather than engaging directly with the editorial com-ponent of the sustainability vision. We are encouraged to see this focus in the new sustainability strategy.

Two highlights of the year were the 10:10 campaign and the Katine project. The former is an excellent demonstra-tion of the Guardian using its influence in encouraging individuals and organisa-

tions to commit to reducing carbon emis-sions by 10% by 2010. The next step will be to evaluate how successful those who joined were in achieving their 10% reduc-tion and report back on the challenges as well as the successes.

Likewise, Katine has been another highly successful demonstration of how the Guardian can use its influence to cata-lyse change. As that project comes to an end, we are encouraged that the Guard-ian is considering how to use its editorial prowess, building on the Katine experi-ence, to report more widely on issues of international development.

A deeper change that is already trans-forming the Guardian’s sustainability cov-erage is the move towards mutualisation. Such an inclusive approach is a promising sign that stakeholder engagement, far from being a technical activity under-taken by the sustainability department, is increasingly becoming a dynamic part of daily life of the editorial teams. While some areas may be more active than oth-ers, we believe this has the potential to put stakeholders at the heart of the Guardian’s editorial coverage.

Business strategyGiven the existential threat over the last year, it is unsurprising that much of the Guardian’s efforts have been focussed on cutting costs and shoring up revenues. Last year we stated that “Guardian News and Media is in a privileged position because of its relationship to the Scott Trust and in our view must be seen to both lead the way in developing a new model and at the same time ensuring it is compatible with its sustainability vision”. In our view, the Guardian has kept its eye on its values throughout the year. It may have lacked clear strategic direction on sustainability at times and governance structures may have been up in the air, but the move to mutualisation, the re-formed sustain-ability leadership group and the passion of staff, all demonstrate this commitment. Albeit controversial, the approach to potential outsourcing of some IT support services also shows a clear commitment to upholding values during tough times.

CommercialLast year we stated: “It is rare to find a sales and marketing function that has embraced sustainability with such vigour.” And this has not changed. However, the business


climate has changed and this has led to sev-eral of commercial’s sustainability targets not being met. We accept that a delay to the deadline for some targets is a reason-able response. We also find that ambitious growth plans for sustainable advertising network revenues are indicative of the increasing importance of sustainability-related revenue to the commercial side of the Guardian’s operations. The launch of diversity-related services and Guardian Sustainable Business show how embed-ded sustainability is in this part of the business.

As the editorial department’s approach to mutualisation develops, we believe it will be important for the commercial departments to determine how they will adapt to this new world. Some steps have already been taken, such as open plat-form. As this approach accelerates, it will become increasingly important not just to find new revenue streams, but to ensure they are aligned to the Guardian’s values.

There is a continuing need to ensure that the eco:metrics’ underlying data is sufficiently robust to enable clients to make reliable decisions about choices based on CO2 impact.

PeopleEarlier in the year, the Guardian undertook its regular employee opinion survey and we noted that responses were encourag-ing despite the significant changes under-way. Nevertheless, the survey identified a number of areas for improvement and in order to address these, there needs to be a clear process in place for departments to identify and implement actions.

The job losses have taken their toll on morale, exacerbated by restructuring. However, we believe that the Guard-ian has gone to considerable lengths to ensure the changes have been made with an overall sense of fairness. Examples of this are cutting staff at senior levels rather than just junior posts, and promising to offer enhanced redundancy if people are moved to another company through out-sourcing.

While it was positive to see the commer-cial side of the company hit its appraisal target, we noted poor progress on the editorial side and believe it is all the more important that effort is focussed on meet-ing this year’s more ambitious target. The approach to diversity has shown notable progress this year, including initiatives to

widen inclusivity within editorial. It will be important to continually evaluate these programmes to ensure they are achieving the Guardian’s objectives and helping to broaden the readership and coverage of reported issues. However, this is the third diversity strategy in as many years. Both previous strategies have been abandoned before their success was measured, mak-ing it very difficult to find evidence of consistent improvement. This is a state of affairs we look forward to the new approach remedying.

OperationsIt is a credit to the organisation that, despite the personnel changes and disrup-tion associated with the present commer-cial climate, impetus to achieve environ-mental improvements in operations has been maintained. Environmental manage-ment across the print sites is now better co-ordinated and real improvements have been made, especially in reducing energy consumption. Improvements in office waste management have also been dem-onstrated, with a substantial reduction in the amount of waste going to landfill.

The database of environmental infor-mation about purchased paper is proving to be an excellent management tool for tracking and improving the environmen-tal characteristics of paper supply. We also noted the efforts being made to embed sustainability in other areas of the supply chain.

The Guardian has an ambitious vision of becoming carbon positive. While some work has been done in the past year to define this goal and to further map carbon impacts, much remains to be done to trans-late this vision into clearly defined actions. For example, in spite of the preliminary work done this year on the impacts of digital operations, the Guardian, in com-mon with many media organisations, still under-reports carbon impacts from dig-ital publishing. Other key pieces from the carbon footprint jigsaw, notably product distribution, are also still missing. Turn-ing the carbon positive vision into force-ful operational actions is an area where the Guardian could show real leadership during the coming year.

The clarity and comparability of per-formance information would be enhanced through the use of graphs or summary tables that include systematic compari-sons with prior years and benchmarks.

CommunityWe noted the increase in participation in volunteering this year. The Guardian sup-ports all employees to undertake up to two working days each year of voluntary work with one of the eight community part-ners. This year the Commercial depart-ment strongly promoted that all staff par-ticipated in some volunteering. As well as benefits to the community partners, indi-viduals benefited personally from partici-pating and feedback was positive.

We are pleased to see the Guardian developing its monitoring and evaluation of community programmes in particular to quantify the impacts and benefits arising from its investments – both financial and volunteering time.

Two Tomorrows (Europe) LimitedLondonJune 2010


The Guardian’s vision is to be at the forefront of a new collaboration and participation movement among the media

Journalism has come a long way since the former Times econom-ics editor Peter Jay famously told a subeditor he wrote for only three people – the paper’s editor, the Governor of the Bank of England, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

The internet revolution is helping to create seismic changes in society in which the old power structures are breaking down and influence and power no longer rests solely in a few hands. Technological advances offer a historic opportunity to develop new forms of collaboration and participation, and the Guardian’s vision is to be at the forefront of this movement.

This ties directly into the whole move-ment towards sustainable development, which relies on listening to and engaging with all stakeholders, rather than seeking to command and control and respond to only to those who have a seat at the top table.

Janine Gibson, editor of guardian.co.uk, gives the example of the legal gag on the Guardian’s coverage of oil trader Trafigura that was lifted only after a gnomic tweet from Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rus-bridger led to a huge outpouring of anger in the virtual world: “Our influence is potentially much greater now because our coverage not only has authority but we are also able to galvanise people to respond on issues that they care about,” she says.

Rusbridger described in a recent lec-ture the extent to which our journalism is changing. He says that in the recent past journalists considered themselves – and were perhaps considered by others – spe-cial figures of authority: “We had the infor-mation and the access; you didn’t. You trusted us to filter news and information and to prioritise it – and to pass it on accu-rately, fairly, readably and quickly.

“That state of affairs is now in tension with a world in which many (but not all) readers want to have the ability to make their own judgments; express their own priorities; create their own content; artic-ulate their own views; learn from peers as much as from traditional sources of authority. Journalists may remain one source of authority, but people may also be less interested to receive journalism in an inert context – ie which can’t be responded to, challenged, or knitted in with other sources.

“This, journalistically, is immensely

Leading the way through mutualisation

challenging and rich. Journalists have never before been able to tell stories so effectively, bouncing off each other, link-ing to each other (as the most generous and open-minded do), linking out, citing sources, allowing response – harnessing the best qualities of text, print, data, sound and visual media. If ever there was a route to building audience, trust and relevance, it is by embracing all the capabilities of this new world, not walling yourself away from them.

“Two further points about this fluid, constantly-iterative world of linked reporting and response: first, many read-ers like this ability to follow conversations, compare multiple sources and links. Sec-ondly, the result is journalistically better – a collaborative-as-well-as-competitive approach which is usually likely to get to the truth of things, faster.”

While Rusbridger is clear on his vision, he recognises that a further restructuring of the editorial departments needs to hap-pen for this to become a reality.

To help towards this radical shift, Rus-bridger held a series of breakfasts in spring 2010 with staff from across the organisa-tion, to discuss the opportunities and pit-falls of mutualisation.

To help focus that debate, he created 10 principles of mutualisation (see box), including the recognition that journal-ists are not the only voices of authority, expertise and interest and that our cov-erage should be transparent and open to challenge.

What was clear from the meetings was that while some welcome the new media world, there are fears about the Guardian losing its distinctive voice amongst the cacophony of noise on the web and that there are simply not enough resources to be fully mutualised and maintain the qual-ity of our journalism.

Gibson believes these fears are over-blown: “This does not, as some journalists fear, render our expertise redundant but it encourages other people to get involved and have their say.

“All mainstream media has a fear of let-ting go, that they will just become one of the crowd. If every blogger is a journal-ist what makes us special? There are real issues about diluting our sense of history and principles, but what will prevent this is by keeping a very clear sense of who we are and transmit that to others.”

On the question of journalists being

overwhelmed by the demands of serving a number of platforms, Gibson says the pressures are easing as the editorial staff get a better understanding of how to work effectively with new technology.

“With technology offering so many new ways of doing things, there was a brief period where we were trying to do every-thing and editorial staff were getting over-whelmed,” she says. “But we have become more sophisticated and learnt what is best in different situations.

“One of the more interesting develop-ments is the use of live blogs, which allows our users to experience the unfolding of news along with us, rather than just seeing the result of our inquiries as was the case with our newspapers.

“They now get to see the frantic pad-dling that goes on under the water to produce a particular article. This is very effective at building trust by opening up the process. Live blogs allow people to join in and contribute their expertise and opinions.”

The election blog hosted by Andrew Sparrow was a classic example of how successful this form of publishing is. In fact, on the day of the election results, the Guardian secured nearly a 40% share of the major UK press titles online and appears to have taken share from both the Times and Mail.

Managing director Tim Brooks says with some certainty that for the first time since the Guardian was created in 1821, more people read about a general election from Guardian journalists rather than Times journalists.

Moreover, he says there were more than 1,500 comments on the Guardian election blog compared with the Times Online, which had less than 100.

Another concern raised by some staff is that articles can draw abusive comments which actually limit the opportunity to debate, rather than extend it. This is par-ticularly the case in controversial subjects such as the Israel/Palestine debate.

Rusbridger recognises this and says this is an area that is being actively inves-tigated: “There are lots of concerns, not least the ignorant, relentlessly negative, sometimes hate-filled tone of some of what you get back when you open the doors. That can sometimes feel not very much like a community at all, let alone a community of reasonably like-minded, progressive, intelligent people coming


together around some virtual idea of the Guardian. So there are a throng of issues around identity, moderation, ranking, recommendation and aggregation which we – along with everyone else – are grap-pling with.”

Gibson says the level of abuse often falls away when a journalist writing a piece remains on the comment thread and responds to contributions.

Gibson points to deputy editor Kath Viner who replied to critical comments, in the wake of an article highlighting the lack of diversity within David Cameron’s new cabinet.

“Everyone said that was a really good example of the benefits of positive engage-ment,” says Gibson. “If you don’t show up, you cannot complain about peoples’ responses. There are resource issues about this, but Comment is Free has done excel-lent work on getting writers to engage.”

Ten principles of mutualisation•It encourages participation. It invites and/or allows a response:•It is not an inert, “us” to “them”, form of publishing.• It encourages others to initiate debate, publish material or make suggestions. We can follow, as well as lead. We can involve others in the pre-publication processes.• It helps form [also: enable / nurture] communities of joint interest around sub-jects, issues or individuals.• It is open to the web and is part of it. It links to, and collaborates with, other mate-rial (including services) on the web.• It aggregates and/or curates the work of others.• It recognises that journalists are not the only voices of authority, expertise and interest.• It aspires to achieve, and reflect, diver-sity as well as promoting shared values.• It recognises that publishing can be the beginning of the journalistic process rather than the end.• It is transparent and open to challenge – including correction, clarification and addition.


We see this conversational, two-way version of journalism as a real opportunity to engage with our readers and users

Collaborate or dry up. That’s the warning from messengers like Google’s chief executive who has declared that “everyone is your partner” and Guard-ian editor Alan Rusbridger who says “We are reach-

ing towards the idea of a mutualised news organisation.” This more conversational, two-way and engaged version of journal-ism is an opportunity.

We try to put it – mutualisation, col-laboration, partnerships, crowd-sourcing, community interaction, call it what you will – at the heart of what we do on envi-ronmentguardian.co.uk.

This is very much in the spirit of creat-ing sustainable organisations, recognising that preaching to stakeholders is no longer the answer and that the 21st century is very much about engagement with them. At the heart of any media company must be a dialogue with its audience, as well as creating strong connections with other stakeholders such as suppliers and limit-ing impacts on the environment through responsible business practices.

With subjects as technically complex and wide-ranging as endangered species, years-old global climate talks, feed-in tar-iffs, oil spills, energy and deforestation, collaborating with experts and our com-munity is essential.

To that end, we set up the Guardian Environment Network, which brings together more than 20 sites including Grist, the Ecologist and Real Climate, to highlight diverse and specialist environ-ment stories from across the planet.

Readers also lead the subjects and sto-ries we cover. Environment Today, a new blog series, sees Guardian users telling us what they think the big stories of the day are, and the ongoing issues – such as popu-lation or green technology developments – that we should be investigating.

Other corners of guardian.co.uk, such as the Today in Sport and You Tell Us on CiF have blazed the trail for us here.

A considerable sum of the content we publish is created by environment users. Reader’s photos of everything from garden birds and insects, to blossom and signs of spring, have appeared on Flickr, on our site and sometimes in the Eyewitness centre spread of the paper too.

Companies that make grand green claims, from Sony and M&S to Innocent

Collaboration is the future for news

and Green & Blacks, have submitted them-selves to searching and tough questions from the environment community in You ask, they answer. Readers’ green living questions – why don’t we use water-sav-ing urinals at home? Is it time to fit solar panels? Is tofu really good for the environ-ment? – are part-answered by other read-ers, as part of our Ask Leo & Lucy series.

Most recently, we’ve drawn on the wisdom of the crowd and our graphical expertise to bring together the changes – greener buildings, more cycle-friendly cities, protection for the world’s poorest – that green groups are asking of the next government.

Together, what we produce with our community is richer, more timely and more in-depth. As Rusbridger puts it: “they [readers] bring us a rich diversity, specialist expertise and on the ground reporting that we couldn’t possibly hope to achieve without including them in what we do.”


A new collaborative approach to journalism that incorporates social media is changing the way we work – for the better - says the Guardian’s head of society, health and education policy

Mutualised media: it may sound a bit faddy and contrived, but it’s possibly the most profound – and in many ways liber-ating – development in my 20 years of

journalism. The idea that our readers, and the people we write about, are our increas-ingly active partners in what and how we report, is transforming the way my section of the Guardian covers public services and education.

Journalism has always been to some extent a partnership, of course. We’ve always had our “sources”, both official and unnofficial. But interactive digital tech-nology has massively expanded that pool of expertise by enabling the authentic, unmediated voices of social workers, doc-tors, nurses, teachers, university lecturers – as well as students, patients and other users of public services – to emerge.

It’s changed what we publish, the way we publish and how we gather informa-tion and intelligence. Blogging and Twit-ter has enabled us to capture the drama of big events – school exam results, for example – as experienced by and effec-tively “reported” on by some of the tens of thousands of pupils, teachers and parents at the centre of the story.

A regular section of the Society Daily blog is devoted to curating the wisdom, insights, and musings of the expert public services blogosphere. We’ve hired some of the most talented bloggers – from ambu-lance technicians to charity leaders – to write articles for us. We are currently ask-ing our readers to help us design a Guard-ian social enterprise conference: in effect asking them, what do you want your con-ference to be about?

A few years ago what we published had to fit to a prescribed format: the some-times harsh, black-and-white conventions of a news story. If it didn’t fit, it didn’t make the paper. Blogging gives us a more inclu-sive and discursive approach to reporting: one that brings out the nuance, texture and complexity of stories. It allows you to link to source material and supporting evidence. We are saying to readers: don’t just take it on trust, “click here” and check our sources.

Critics say that the speed and informal-ity of new media is compromising our commitment to “the facts”. To that I’d

One journalist’s view of how mutualisation is liberating the news media

say we haven’t abandoned news, edito-rial judgement or journalistic standards and disciplines; we’ve simply found fresh ways to gather and present it. I also believe it has the potential to enable us to enhance the authority and credibility of what we publish.

That instant connection with readers, the knowledge that what you write can be discussed, fact-checked and challenged in public represents an informal accountabil-ity that has a critical bearing on the way I write and what I write. It demands humil-ity, a constant questioning of assumptions and closer engagement with the people we write about. A conversation, in other words. As ever, we don’t always get it right: but I’d like to think that it forces us to try to be better journalists.

Patrick Butler is head of Society, health and education at the Guardian


Global warming remains a great threat to humanity which is why we have placed the issue at the top of our editorial agenda

The failure of the UN’s cli-mate summit in Copen-hagen to reach the deal needed to avoid the worst impacts of climate change does not mean the prob-lem has gone away – quite the reverse.

Global warming remains a great threat and one of the defining issues of our gen-eration will be humanity’s response to that challenge. That belief underpins the decision by Guardian News & Media to continue to place this issue firmly at the top of our editorial agenda, and to employ what we believe to be the largest specialist team of environmental journalists in the world.

GNM set this direction more than three years ago when the board worked on its sustainability vision which recognises that “our greatest impact comes from inform-ing and influencing our global audience. We will therefore build on our position as a recognised leader in the reporting of environmental and social justice issues, by providing the most comprehensive news coverage on subjects such as climate change, environmental degradation and social inequality”.

As the vision suggests, while climate change is of vital importance, we also recognise there are other related issues of fundamental significance that need addressing ranging from the loss of biodi-versity and water scarcity to social justice and the overuse of resources.

For example, in May 2010 the Guard-ian carried an exclusive story ahead of the publication of a major report for the United Nations which argues that the economic case for global action to stop the destruc-tion of the natural world is even more powerful than the argument for tackling climate change.

Ian Katz, Guardian deputy editor, says: “We lost the impetus around climate change with the failure of Copenhagen, the Climategate issue and the loss of Ed Milliband as environment secretary.

“We now need to bring the kettle back to the boil, while also not ignoring other key issues such as biodiversity and social justice.

“Over the next 12 months we will be con-centrating our resources on rebuilding the case for action on climate change, because this is where we believe we can play an important role. We now have a credible

Leading the way in environmental reporting

record of being activists by leading the call for action, with campaigns such as 10:10, as well as being extremely hard-headed by thoroughly investigating areas that appear to undermine the case.

“We had some of the most aggressive reporting on the consequences of the leak of emails from East Anglia University, which became known as Climategate. Our thorough investigation not only gave us increased credibility in our reporting but also showed that while mistakes had been made, the scientific case had not been seri-ously undermined.”

Over the coming year Katz is keen to make data from the Government and NGOs open sourced as well as creating the ultimate Q&A that looks at the most con-troversial questions about climate change and source the answers from uncontro-vertible sources.

He also believes it is important to con-tinue to debate the rules of the game on science going forward to ensure it remains credible, while also ensuring the new coa-lition government holds to its commit-ments.

The environment website, environ-mentguardian.co.uk, was relaunched in 2009 and is resourced with what we believe is the largest team of dedicated journalists of any English language news organisation in the world.

As a result of this focus, the Guardian, Observer and environmentguardian.co.uk were in 2009 awarded the top prize at the Environmental Journalism awards.

The award came after web analysts Com-Score rated environmentguardian.co.uk as the most popular environment site in the world in September 2009 and currently the largest green website in the UK, while the number of unique users between July to March 2010 more than doubled to 19.1 million, compared with the 9.2 million the same period the year before.

The 12-strong editorial staff also work closely with other specialist writers from around the Guardian and Observer.

Katz says: “We have built our coverage around concentric circles. While there is a core team, we also know these issues cut across virtually every area of our coverage, which is why the environment pod works so closely with journalists writing about economics, politics, transport as well as our foreign correspondents. This means we have another twenty plus reporters contributing towards our coverage.”

The environment team made a commit-ment last year to follow four key strands in its editorial approach. Below are some of the ways the team have delivered on their promises.

Reporting the latest scientific research, from the Arctic to Australia

The scientific case for climate change faced unprecedented criticism in 2010 following leaked emails from climate sci-entists at the University of East Anglia and the uncovering of mistakes in reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The Guardian tackled this head on and published the definitive 12-part account of the affair, which revealed apparent attempts to cover up flawed data; moves to prevent access to climate data; and to keep research from climate sceptics out of the scientific literature.

In keeping with GNM’s value of open-ness, web users were encouraged to anno-tate the manuscript to help the Guardian create the definitive account of the contro-versy. This was an attempt at a collabora-tive route to getting at the truth and the result of this unique approach will soon be published as a book.

Hold those in positions of power to account

We believe our reporting of the Copen-hagen summit was without rival and in particular gave full voice to the nations of the South whose peoples are set to bear the brunt of climate change.

The secret “Danish text” that was leaked to the Guardian was the key media moment of the conference. The secret draft agreement represented a departure from the Kyoto protocol’s principle that rich nations, which have emitted the bulk of the CO2, should take on firm and bind-ing commitments to reduce greenhouse gases, while poorer nations were not com-pelled to act.

In the UK, the Guardian has given wholehearted support to the 10:10 climate change campaign, rewarded not only by huge engagement, but also the commit-ment from the new government to cut the emissions of central government by 10% within 12 months.

Reflect the human face of environmental change and celebrate the beauty of the natural world


The relaunched website has enabled a step change in how we present these sto-ries, through images, video, sounds and words. These have ranged from a global project to capture the faces and stories of climate change; an epic journey from the glaciers of Nepal to the deltas of Bang-ladesh, to numerous projects closer to home including garden birdwatching and encouraging users to send it in their pho-tographs of blossom and bluebells.

Provide the information people need to live a green and sustainable lifeThe Guardian believes the key to spurring readers into action is by informing them and hosting debates. One such event was a green hustings held before the election and involving the key spokesmen on the environment from each of the main par-ties.

The Guardian developed the phenom-enon of the “cashless man”, a series of unique Guardian carbon calculators. A personal carbon calculator was launched in 2009, but to highlight the fact that many sources of carbon emissions are beyond the control of an individual, the Guard-ian subsequently developed a tool which attempts to model where the UK’s carbon emissions come from. It encourages the user to play the role of the UK prime minis-ter to explore different scenarios of how to change consumption, travel, power gener-ation and other sectors of the economy.

Beyond encouraging engagement via Twitter and Facebook, the Guardian expanded its Environment Network of the best environment sites, which now includes Grist, the Ecologist, Nature, and Real Climate.

To augment editorial coverage, the envi-ronment site has developed a data store, giving key statistics on a range of topics such as energy, rail travel and endangered species.

To augment editorial coverage, the envi-ronment site has developed a data store, giving key statistics on a range of topics such as energy, rail travel and endangered species.


With high-profile support from GNM 10:10 has involved people in creating change rather than lecturing them on sustainability

The past year has seen the Guardian editorial teams working on a number of projects that bring to life Guardian News & Media’s sustainability vision. The aim is to promote public debate on sustainability

issues and encourage readers to make a difference on an individual and commu-nity level.

Key amongst these was our critical sup-port for the launch in September 2009 of 10:10, a new campaign to encourage indi-viduals, businesses, schools and other organisations to reduce their carbon foot-print by 10% in 2010. Participants sign up on the 10:10 website and then receive regular tips and advice on reducing their emissions.

At the time of going to press, 10:10 had succeeded in signing up and engaging more than 65,000 people, 2,610 businesses and 3,100 organisations and educational institutions.

These include the commitment of the Conservative-Lib Dem coalition to cut cen-tral government emissions by 10% over 12 months – equivalent to taking more than 200,000 cars off the road.

Guardian deputy editor Ian Katz, who was behind the development of the cam-paign, said this response would not have been possible without the high-profile support of GNM, which has given sus-tained coverage to the project. He said: “This is a great example of how to involve people in creating change, rather lecturing them on sustainability.

“10:10 has been amazing because it has permeated through all sections of the paper, such as the G2 supplement, as well as the arts and comment section.

“I have been disappointed by the lack of individuals signing up, but in other ways 10:10 has been far more successful than we could ever have imagined, such as Cameron announcing within days of being elected that the government will cut its emissions by 10%.

“Policymakers have recognised that it is a more effective and appealing way of mak-ing the case for low-carbon living than all the government’s advertising campaigns such as Act on CO2.”

Given the need for concerted action to reduce the risk of climate change, the Guardian has recognised the importance of forming partnerships and coalitions in

10:10 campaign succeeded in enabling readers to reduced emissions

order to try to quicken the pace of change. For example, the vision behind the 10:10 campaign had originally been for all the UK’s national newspapers to carry the same headline on the same day. When this proved impossible, the Guardian worked jointly with the Sun but unfortunately they pulled out at the last moment.

More successful was the collaboration that in December 2009 saw the Guardian overseeing the creation of a leader article on climate change, that was published not only by the Guardian but by 56 other news-papers around the world. Printed to coin-cide with the opening of the UN climate conference in Copenhagen, the aim was to produce a unique piece of journalism that conveyed the profound significance of this issue.

Some of the world’s best known papers, such as Le Monde, El Pais, Russia’s Novaya Gazeta and the Toronto Star, took part as well as two Chinese papers – the Economic Observer and the Southern Metropolitan – and India’s second largest English-lan-guage paper, The Hindu.

Alan Rusbridger, editor-in-chief of GNM, said: “Newspapers have never done any-thing like this before, but they have never had to cover a story like this before.”

To encourage debate on the back of the global leader project, readers were invited to submit their own version of the leader and the best examples were published on the Guardian website.

Another example of working in part-nership was a project In July 2009 with the Manchester International festival to stimulate debate on large-scale solutions to climate change. The Manchester Report saw leading scientists, engineers and oth-ers come to a public event in Manchester town hall to advocate solutions, ranging from agricultural to the positively sci-fi-esque.

A panel of experts chaired by Lord Bing-ham were present to assess the presenta-tions, while Guardian readers were invited to vote on their preferred solutions online. The end result was a report that was sent to policymakers all around the world, in addition to being given out with the news-paper.


We seek the best possible coverage of everything, but we must not forget our core mission to remain editorially independent

It is said that it’s impossible to under-stand one’s destiny without having a deep knowledge of one’s history.

This is certainly true of the Guardian, which was created in 1821 in the aftermath of the Peter-loo Massacre, in which 15 people were killed at a rally in Manchester

calling for better parliamentary represen-tation. So while we seek, along with other mainstream news organisations, to offer the best possible coverage of everything from news and sport to fashion and the arts, we remain aware of our deep roots. At our peril do we forget our core mission, which is to remain editorially independ-ent, without party affiliation to the liberal tradition.

At the heart of the liberal tradition is the recognition that our national and global communities are riven with deep inequali-ties, which are an affront to our sense of humanity, and that social justice is a neces-sary precondition for a healthy society.

We see our “duty to the reader and the community” is to expose the causes of this suffering and to hold those in power responsible for their actions.

Over the past year, the Guardian cham-pioned several causes and investigations, ranging from our dogged pursuit of oil traders Trafigura, to a push for an improve-ment to the libel laws. Special investiga-tions have looked at corruption by the arms firm BAE, which led to a £300m pay-out by the company in February, police treatment of protesters in the wake of the G20 protests, as well as the News of the World phone-hacking scandal and Ian Cobain’s in-depth investigation into the use of torture on British detainees.

The power of the Guardian’s reporting lies not just in its high-profile investigative reporting, but also in the constant atten-tion brought to issues that are not often discussed in the other media. For exam-ple, throughout the past year, Amelia Gen-tleman on the Guardian and Amelia Hill on the Observer have covered domestic topics as diverse as child protection, help-ing parents with addiction, old peoples’ homes, the probation service, antisocial behaviour and child poverty.

We asked our research and information department to pick a week out at random, from the 8th to the 14th March, 2010 to give a snapshot of the range of issues we cover. Climate change was one theme on the agenda.

Social justice

The Guardian ran a comment piece from Peter Preston on the need for strong lead-ership in the green movement; commen-tary from George Monbiot on how to bat-tle public hostility to research; and a news story by Juliette Jowit and Tim Webb on greenhouse gas permits. Ian Cobain and Richard Norton-Taylor wrote about Dame Manningham-Buller’s claim that MI5 knew nothing of the alleged torture of detainees by American agents, the latest in a series of Guardian investigations into the use of torture.

The Observer, meanwhile, led with Tony Thompson’s exclusive In Focus interview with “Officer A”, an undercover police officer who infiltrated a violent far-left group of activists. The year had seen continuing fallout of several high-profile child abuse cases, including the death of Baby Peter in Haringey, and on 10 March, the Society supplement ran a special series looking at children’s services.

Erwin James continued to write about injustice in the prison system with a piece about two prison detainees held in solitary confinement for 38 years. Other articles challenging the justice system included a piece by Afua Hirsch on the possible intro-duction of secret trials, Sandra Laville on the failures of Nottinghamshire police force and an article by Duncan Campbell on a miscarriage of justice.

Rory McCarthy continued our coverage of alleged abuses in Gaza with a piece on the death of Rachel Corrie, whose family has brought a civil case against Israel, and an Observer article on Palestinian juve-niles imprisoned in Israel.

A food investigation on 13 March led by Felicity Lawrence and Karen McVeigh looked at violence in food factories, including a case study of foreign workers in the meat industry. Several stories that week addressed the mistreatment of failed asylum seekers in detention centres, while Simon Hattenstone and Matthew Taylor investigated the targeting of young Mus-lims, who were arrested after a protest against Israel’s attacks on Gaza last year.

The Guardian kept up pressure on Lord Ashcroft, the multimillionaire deputy chairman of the Conservative party, after he admitted he is a non-dom – a status which means he does not pay UK tax on his overseas income.


The Guardian gained international recognition for its part in bringing to light the behaviour of the offshore oil traders

If Guardian News & Media were to highlight one investigation over the past year that would sum up our core values of “honesty, cleanness [integrity], courage, fairness, and a sense of duty to the reader and the community”, it would have to be our exposure of Trafigura.

The Guardian gained international rec-ognition for its part in bringing to light the behaviour of the firm of offshore oil trad-ers whose cheaply-dumped toxic waste poisoned thousands of Africans. The Guardian saw its initial legal battle to pub-lish escalate into a full-scale constitutional crisis, because the wealthy corporation’s lawyers tried to stop the paper reporting proceedings in the British parliament.

Trafigura obtained a superinjunction, banning the Guardian not only from revealing the contents of a leaked scien-tific report, but also even from disclosing that the company had gone to court to get such an injunction. The Guardian, and ulti-mately, many politicians and members of the public, saw this as a Kafkaesque assault on free speech, which had to be defeated.

That defeat was ultimately brought about by a combination of old and new tactics. A Labour MP put down a parlia-mentary question revealing the existence both of the Minton report (the document in question), and of Trafigura’s injunction suppressing its contents.

The order paper also named Trafigura’s lawyers as the firm of Carter-Ruck. MPs have immunity in such circumstances, thanks to the ancient right of “parliamen-tary privilege”. Trafigura now claimed the Guardian was even banned from reporting what had happened in parliament.

At that point, the Guardian’s editor, Alan Rusbridger, made use of the new online world. He posted on Twitter the fact that the Guardian was banned from reporting parliament, for reasons it was unable to disclose. Within hours, thou-sands of citizen detectives had worked out for themselves what information was on the online parliamentary order paper, and tweets were circulating around the world, giving away the secrets Trafigura had hired expensive lawyers to suppress.

There was a further twist to the story. The Guardian had also embarked on an innovative international co-operation with other broadcasters, newspapers and NGOs, to develop a united front against what had become a blizzard of legal threats

Trafigura investigation sums up our core values

and writs from Trafigura.The full contents of the Minton report,

which detailed the highly toxic nature of Trafigura’s contaminated waste, were not only in the hands of the Guardian and BBC Newsnight. They were also in the posses-sion of Norwegian broadcasters NRK, the Dutch newspaper Volkskrant, and Green-peace in Amsterdam. All these bodies were outside the jurisdiction of the UK courts and free to publish, which they went ahead and did. Trafigura was forced to call off its entire legal campaign and the Guardian finally printed the Minton report.

As a result of this battle, we believe the public interest benefited in two ways. First, the facts about a major toxic waste dumping scandal were exposed. Trafigura were influential and well-connected: cur-rent Conservative cabinet member Lord Strathclyde was then on the payroll of a subsidiary (he has since resigned).

With annual profits exceeding £270m, the oil traders were also able to hire expensive libel lawyers Carter-Ruck and prominent lobbyists Bell Pottinger. These companies pursued a “reputation manage-ment strategy”, in which Trafigura claimed their waste-dumping had been routine and harmless, whilst issuing legal threats to critics who argued otherwise. Eventu-ally, however, Trafigura were forced to pay £30m compensation to 30,000 impover-ished African inhabitants of Abidjan in the Ivory Coast, in an out-of-court settle-ment.

Secondly, the Guardian’s challenge and the subsequent constitutional uproar over Trafigura’s tactics, highlighted a legal scandal – the growing use of superinjunc-tions to provide rich individuals and cor-porations with secret gagging orders. An emergency debate in parliament followed. The cross-party media select committee took evidence on this hitherto undocu-mented phenomenon.

Reform took place when the lord chief justice, Lord Judge issued a public state-ment banning the improper use of such gags, saying : “The order should only be made if failing to make it would … cause the very damage that the injunction was designed to avoid.”

In April 2010, the Guardian’s role was internationally recognised when reporter David Leigh was awarded the Daniel Pearl prize by a US foundation, along with part-ners in BBC Newsnight, NRK Norway, and Volkskrant, Amsterdam.

The award for outstanding international investigative reporting was presented in Geneva, by the Washington-based Center for Public Integrity. The judges said the journalists “exposed how a powerful off-shore oil trader tried to cover up the poi-soning of 30,000 west Africans”.


Joint development project in rural Uganda has helped support 25,000 people affected by civil war and climate change

The Guardian is nearing the end of the first stage of a unique experiment in openly and transparently reporting on the difficul-ties and complexities of international develop-ment.

We joined forces nearly three years ago with the African NGO Amref and Barclays bank to create an integrated development project in a rural community in north-east-ern Uganda.

The £3m scheme has been aimed at sup-porting a community of 25,000 people living in and around the village of Katine, most of whom live on less than $1 a day and have been affected by civil war and climate change. The project focuses on health, water, education, financial inclu-sion, livelihoods and governance.

The Guardian has ploughed hundreds of thousands of pounds of its own money into closely monitoring the project, via our specialist journalists, as well as through the eyes of two Ugandan writers who have spent considerable amounts of time reporting directly from Katine.

Never before has a development project come under such scrutiny, with the Guard-ian updating its coverage virtually every day via stories, pictures, videos and web-chats. Originally planned to last three years, the project has now been extended by a further 12 months. This is due to an independent midterm review that warned the project may fail unless there was extra time for Amref to embed its work into the community and ensure the local authority takes ownership once the NGO pulls out.

While Amref contemplates its exit strategy in 2011, we too are thinking how we mark our own departure and assess the impact of the project. Marking the end of the project editorially is relatively straightforward (a supplement, an aca-demic review and an art exhibition are all on the table), but assessing lasting impact is much trickier.

We know that lives have been changed – those who have been to Katine or read the website have seen the new boreholes and the new laboratory with solar panels on the roof. We know that more children are attending school, being taught in new classrooms and sitting behind new desks. We’ve been told how the village savings and loans associations have empowered women to set up their own businesses.

Our unique experiment in Katine is changing lives

But what else? The project has also had a significant impact on the development community. We’ve been invited to speak to NGOs in the UK, Ireland and the Neth-erlands, and to media outlets in North America about our use of new media to report on development.

We’ve also visited a number of universi-ties around the UK to talk about the project and have changed the opinions of some of the project’s initial critics from academia. The chief executives of Barclays and Glaxo SmithKline have toured the project, along with officials from the Department for International Development (Dfid) and Ugandan ministers.

In Katine, the community has become more aware of their exposure to the world, specifically through a number of online chats we’ve hosted on the Katine Chroni-cles blog, which gave residents a chance to talk to people from across the globe. Some members of the community have been taught how to type letters, how to set up an email account and post comments on the blog.

As for legacy, we’re in discussions with Amref about creating a fund that is man-aged locally to ensure a continued flow of money, which will ensure the continued development of new community struc-tures.

Of course, impact and legacy can’t be determined overnight. We certainly plan to visit the sub-county during Amref’s fourth year to check progress. There is also a commitment to keep monitoring the health of the community on an annual basis into the future. As one academic said, if we are serious about assessing impact and finding out whether short-term com-munity based development projects really do change lives, we need to carry out a detailed progress report in eight to 10 years time.


We believe that the hidden facts and statistics that drive our stories should be made public and shared with everyone

The internet revolution has given new meaning to the old adage that “informa-tion is power”.

The Guardian’s desire to educate and inform not only means it has a vital role in bringing hid-

den information into the public domain, but also in recent years, in helping readers and users to make sense of the avalanche of data that is now available, but often impenetrable.

For example, the country has come out of the UK’s first data election. It might not have seemed that way – but in the May 2010 election, raw information and data played a unique role. When the parties argued about immigration – they were arguing about numbers. Same with the debate over the scale of cuts or the size of the deficit. It was all about the stats.

The internet allows access to data on a bigger scale than ever before. Statis-tics published by governments around the world are part of the news currency. In fact, it’s the quantity of data out there that makes finding the right details espe-cially difficult. Type “carbon emissions data” into Google and you will get 3.5m responses. What you need is someone to help you find the key data – and then show you how to use it.

The Guardian was unique among British newspapers when it dived into this sea of statistics with the launch in 2009 of our Datablog and Datastore. What we do is very simple – but very effective. Every day we publish raw information, in an easily-accessible format for our users.

Simon Rogers, editor the Guardian’s Datablog and Datastore, says: “It’s a logi-cal extension of our work as journalists: behind our stories and graphics are often key sets of statistics, which traditionally live for the moment of the publication and then disappear back onto a reporter’s hard drive. We wanted to give those numbers a longer life.”

Using Google Spreadsheets, we have published over 500 sets of data covering everything from carbon emissions by country, through east European immigra-tion figures to the UK, to plastic surgery statistics. The site has been used to publish raw Guardian information too: the execu-tive pay survey data and the background full spreadsheets behind Felicity Law-rence’s supermarket scoops, for instance.

Our data journalism is opening up a world of information

If it’s a story based on numbers, you will find those numbers on the Datablog.

It’s focused around the news: for instance, in the aftermath of the election, we published data from the Electoral Reform Society. These showed how the results would have been different under proportional representation systems.

As the Guardian’s great former editor CP Scott said: “facts are sacred” and the Guardian has a tradition of campaigning for more open information, of making the facts as widely available as possible. The Datablog fits squarely in that tradition. In the past, journalists would keep data to themselves; now we recognise that out there in the world are people who not only know more than us, but have a better idea of what you can really do with it.

The Datablog is about community – and our active users have taken the informa-tion we provide to produce amazing graph-ics and visualisations (which we publish via a Flickr group. During the election campaign for instance, developer Martin Petts used our raw constituency statistics to create the Voter Power Index with the New Economics Foundation. Enter your postcode and the application tells you how powerful your vote is.

It’s all part of a bigger picture: the Guard-ian’s Open Platform. Launched at the same time as the Datablog, the idea of the Open Platform and API is to open up the Guard-ian’s website – and make the content easier to use by developers, who can then use that information to build applications and websites. It’s already produced results: one example is Loco2’s journey-planning application, which makes it easier for environmentally-aware travellers to find viable alternatives to flying. Other devel-opers have used the API to use Guardian content in their applications – all of which ties the Guardian further into the fabric of the web.

In 2006, the Guardian’s technology section launched the Free Our Data cam-paign, to encourage government to make data that we had essentially paid for pub-lic. This year, that dream has started to become reality: the launch of data.gov.uk (which our developers helped build) is just the latest example. It’s part of an interna-tional effort by governments to open up their data.

Earlier this year, we launched the World Government Data search – a one-stop site where you can search government data

sites. So, enter “crime rates” for example, and you will get results back from the US, UK, Australia and New Zealand. We are part of an international community of datajournalists.

Facts are still sacred, just now they belong to everyone.


We are unique in having readers’ editors who listen to the complaints and concerns of the audience and act on their behalf

The Guardian and Observer have a number of safe-guards in place to pro-tect and foster the bond of trust with our readers and users.

These include an edi-torial code of conduct

that goes beyond the guidelines of the Press Complaints Commission and a pub-lished style guide, because the style of a newspaper should complement what it stands for – in the way we write about such issues as gender, race, and disability, and the respect with which we treat those we write about.

The Guardian and the Observer are unique in the British press in having read-ers’ editors – journalists who listen to the complaints and concerns of the audience and act on their behalf, correcting errors and writing columns on the papers’ jour-nalism.

The Guardian was the first to set up the post in 1997 followed four years later by the Observer, although the role on the Sunday paper is combined with other duties. The terms of reference for the Guardian post include “to collect, consider, investigate, respond to, and where appropriate come to a conclusion about readers’ comments, concerns, and complaints in a prompt and timely manner, from a position of inde-pendence within the paper.”

The Guardian readers’ editor dealt with 14,435 communications in the seven months ending May 2010 and published 664 corrections in the paper during that period, although this represents only a fraction of the correcting and clarifying of our online content.

Stephen Pritchard, readers’ editor of the Observer, who dealt with more than 10,000 complaints in 2009, is also presi-dent of the world-wide Organisation of News Ombudsmen (ONO). Below, he looks at the future of the role and the challenges of the job in an online world.

A network of news ombudsmen operates independently in newspa-pers, television and radio all around the world, working with the simple maxim that if the media hold govern-ments and institutions to account, then media should be accountable too.

They maintain their work strength-ens rather than damages the credibil-ity of their news outlets, showing the

Working to strengthen the trust with our readers

reader or viewer that it cares about accuracy, about fairness, about getting the story right.

As president of the ONO for the past two years, I have had a unique oppor-tunity to see at first-hand the desire to increase this form of media self-regula-tion in emerging democracies around the globe ... a desire that belies the accepted wisdom that news ombuds-manship is in decline.

It is true that the recession saw a dozen ombudsmen lose their jobs in the United States in 2008/9 but now as confidence is returning so are the ombudsmen, with three new appoint-ments made already this year.

But it is in the rest of the world that real interest is being shown. In the past year, ONO members have visited India, Mongolia, Azerbaijan, the Pacific Islands, Taiwan, Lithuania, Cyprus and Turkey at the request of their media organisations who wish to learn more about appointing ombudsmen in their newsrooms. Future “missions” are also planned to Africa and the Middle East.

While all this activity is extremely useful, there is an even wider ques-tion exercising the minds of working ombudsmen today: how do they deal with the internet?

My colleague, Yavuz Baydar, the read-ers’ representative at Sabah, Istanbul and a former president of ONO has recently writ-ten a major survey for Unesco on ombuds-manship worldwide, in which he discusses the impact of the internet on journalism.

He writes: “The internet has not only helped trigger an explosion in the number of news outlets, independent websites and blogs, it has also opened up suppressed corners of the world to the free flow of information. In addition, it has allowed the public to be more involved in the news process and has changed the practices and content of journalism.”

This poses enormous challenges to the conventional wisdom and ethics of jour-nalism, he says, noting that as the inter-net weakens editorial control of content, the need for self-regulation in the virtual domain has become more apparent and urgent than ever.

“The challenges to major news outlets that operate in the most-spoken languages (English, Spanish, Arabic and French) are obvious: their audience is not bound

by geographic borders. As the internet changes the news industry, important questions about traditional values and ethics of journalism, such as account-ability, honesty and balance have been raised.

“For instance, can news organisations that are financially challenged still main-tain democratic values? What is the value of the mainstream media when the inter-net seems to be attracting more attention and revenue? And how can media organi-sations sustain the trust of their readers, listeners and viewers? There are no easy answers to these questions.”

Prof Jeffrey Dvorkin, executive direc-tor of ONO and a former ombudsman of National Public Radio (NPR) in the US, sees the need for more ombudsmen in the age of the internet.

He elaborates: “Mainstream media are increasingly on the defensive about their continued role at a time when the public seems to be seeking information in other ways and in other places, such as the inter-net. That has allowed some media critics – usually bloggers – to accuse “legacy” journalism of increasing irrelevance. In a way they may be right: as circulation and ratings decline, media organisations are looking for ways to sustain their diminish-ing numbers often by “infotainment”.

“In a constant search of efficiencies, news organisations everywhere are ration-alizing resources, seeking that elusive younger demographic by beefing up their websites, but abandoning more expensive aspects such as investigative reporting. Many are letting go some of their most experienced editors and reporters, includ-ing ombudsmen.

“We seem to be living an existential cri-sis for journalism: Can journalism survive without journalists? The same question can well be asked of news ombudsmen – those independent, in-house critics and mediators between the public and the news organisation. Can news organisa-tions rely on cyber-critics rather than ombudsmen?

“The internet is both the villain and the saviour for media organisations: on the one hand, managers are certain that their audiences are being lured away by the siren songs of the blogosphere; on the other hand, in-house bloggers and web-sites are being created everywhere.”

Dvorkin believes that the value of an ombudsman seems more urgent than ever


before. “Media critics in cyberspace have real value in channelling the concerns of the public; but holding media to account and to greater transparency seems more ably done by ombudsmen.”

How can these two essential ingredients be joined for the benefit of readers?“One way would be for ombudsmen to be more open and aware of the criticisms in the blogosphere. Ombudsmen are uniquely situated and qualified to act as the bridge that can connect the public’s hunger for accountability with the news organisations’ acknowledgement that they must do a better job.”

Dvorkin writes that “ombudsmen must be in the forefront of this linkage by being advocates for a Bloggers’ Ethics Guide”.

He suggests that the code of ethics found at www.cyberjournalist.net is appli-cable to a large extent. Dvorkin empha-sizes that “As cyberjournalism becomes more prominent, ‘legacy’ ombudsmen can have a positive role in nurturing ethi-cal behaviour. In the process, the sharing of knowledge can only serve to benefit the public who need reliable and transparent information, wherever they seek it.”

Dvorkin believes that the new age of online media ushers in the need for “cyberombudsmen”:

“Being a ‘cyberombudsman’ will require new skills because it will require the same viral approach as the new medium itself demands. That means taking a more pro-active role, seeking online the discussions and issues that have an impact on the journalism. To borrow a sports analogy, it means playing a lot of ‘offence’ more than ‘defence.’ The new role will be one where the skills of key word searches, algorithms and a constant connection with media bloggers will combine to create a new form of ombudsmanship.”

In effect, this next generation of “cyberombudsmen” will be the new bridge not only between traditional media and traditional audiences. He or she will also have to bridge the gap between traditional media and their rapidly proliferating corps of digital critics.

This means that in order for journalism to fulfil its own critical role as a lynchpin for democratic values, media organisa-tions and ombudsmen need to reassess their roles and relationships – with each other and with the rapidly evolving audi-ences who remain hungry for accountabil-

ity and integrity.The credibility of the news organisa-

tion rests increasingly on the willingness to admit mistakes and to allow the public into the now no longer mysterious proc-ess. Citizen journalists increasingly feel they have the right to challenge the media, but too often they attempt this without the knowledge or the ethical capacity to do this effectively.

Dvorkin believes that the old model of the ombudsman as the solitary, expe-rienced and somewhat isolated figure in the newsroom needs to change. “The way to make this work is to engage more and younger journalists with their skills and their new ways of making sense of the world. They must be brought into the media business with the specific and urgent task of transforming ombudsmen into “cyberombudsmen” and creating a new and needed approach to digital democracy.”


As local papers face huge drops in staff and resources, we are using our national presence to aid community reporting

While the Guard-ian has been focusing in the last few years on fulf i l l ing its ambition to become the world’s leading

liberal voice, it has come under criticism from readers for failing to focus on issues much closer to home.

The Guardian, along with the rest of the national press, is often accused of being London-centric and failing to report on issues that affect the UK regions. Our annual readers’ survey has in past years highlighted this issue as one of particular concern. When asked in the 2009 question-naire whether our coverage adequately reflects society in terms of covering the regions, only 43% of Guardian readers agreed, with 37% actively disagreeing. On the Observer, the scores were even worse.

Readers’ concern has dovetailed with concerns by Alan Rusbridger, the editor-in-chief of Guardian News and Media, that local democracy has been imperiled by the retrenchment of regional and local news-papers, as a result of the combination of the internet revolution and recession.

To counter this, the Guardian in 2010 launched Guardian Local, with the crea-tion of blogs in three key regional cities – Leeds, Cardiff and Edinburgh. Guardian Local editor Sarah Hartley says the project has already received an enthusiastic wel-come, especially for their role on holding councils to account for their actions.

Sarah Hartley Guardian Local editor Sarah Hartley Photograph: Linda NylindHartley said: “Visitors to any of the blogs will see that the content is a mixture of utility, ie tools that people can use to achieve some end, such as reporting a local problem to the council and editorial of a more traditional nature, including reports from council meetings or reviews of local events.

“The editorial direction encompasses the wider ethos and values of the Guard-ian, with the guiding principle being that the activity is all about connecting citizens to power.”

The site tools have been developed in partnership with the organisation MySo-ciety which is also known for its work on MPs’ accountability, with TheyWorkFo-

Guardian Local aims to better reflect our UK regions

rYou and the elections scrutiny work of DemocracyClub.

The Guardian has recruited and trained a beatblogger for each city, whose job is to use traditional journalism skills as well as social media and community engage-ment. Each beatblogger is able to pull on the wider resource of the Guardian in London – and also the newsrooms in each locality, operated by the radio business of the Guardian’s parent company, Guardian Media Group.

Hartley says: “Each blog is develop-ing to become the hub of a network in the community and harness the talents, enthusiasm and often sheer doggedness of local people to see issues addressed and creativity celebrated.

“As we enter the project’s second year, I’m optimistic that Local will prove to be a way that the Guardian can explore networked journalism in action, and help inform the mutualisation debate, by working through the issues and chal-lenges which face a major news organisa-tion working in a grassroots environment in this innovative way.”

The Leeds beatblogger, John Baron, describes his work with the local com-munity.John Baron profile pic John Baron, Guard-ian Local’s Leeds beatblogger

“The Guardian’s Leeds blog had only been up and running a few months by the time of this report – but we’ve already tapped into the grassroots community campaigns that get the city talking. My aim has been to feature the issues that really matter to Leeds residents – giving them a voice and featuring them on a frequent basis and in such depth that no other local media is able to match.

“One of the major issues has involved Kirkgate market, the largest covered mar-ket in Europe. Traders and shoppers have been campaigning to get more invest-ment, publicity, better management and lower rents at the grade 1-listed building from Leeds council. There are complaints of neglect and a feeling the council is pur-posefully running down the market to sell the building, when property and land prices pick up. We’ve posted more than a dozen stories so far, and it has already made an impact, as the Guardian’s cover-age has been mentioned several times at the most recent full council meeting in Leeds.

“Another issue we’ve focused on includes residents in the Hyde Park area campaigning to turn a former primary school building, which is now dilapidated, into a community hub. We’ve done about a dozen stories focusing in depth on the campaign and essentially supporting the campaign’s request to get a fair hearing from the council. I’ve attended about six public meetings and campaign meetings. As a result of the campaign, councillors postponed the decision to give the resi-dents more time to put together a more comprehensive proposal – and the joint council leaders have made noises that publicly they’re impressed with the resi-dents’ plans.

“We’ve also followed the council’s plans to close three Leeds high schools and reo-pen two as academies. This is in addition to other stories including controversy over the funding of the city’s neighbourhood networks for older people, a campaign to stop a waste incinerator being built near houses in east Leeds, community plans to take over a sports centre, which the coun-cil plans to close in south Leeds, a petition and campaign to stop the popular West Park Centre from being turned into hous-ing, and traders in Headingley calling for more parking.”

Offline, Guardian Local jointly hosted a conference in Leeds that has already led to six people expressing early inter-est in setting up their own community websites. There’s also plenty of offline link-ups with the community planned for future, including agreeing to run training sessions for community bloggers – and to have a guest slot – with a local community radio station.


The main strength of the Guardian’s sustainabil-ity influence is through its outstanding environ-mental and social justice content. But what of the rest of its coverage with less obvious sustainabil-

ity connections: Sport, Fashion, Travel, Motoring, Business, Money? Is this con-tent living the values? And if so, how can we tell?

This is not just about measuring the number of sustainability articles (see our recent postings on the Guardian’s sustain-ability blog), but also about the way the department considers sustainability in the cut and thrust of daily news and current affairs.

To assess this, we interviewed a sam-ple of three editorial departments: Travel, Fashion and Society. It was encouraging to see that all three demonstrated an appre-ciation of the key sustainability issues relating to their area. We saw evidence that sustainability was being taken into account when choosing content and in the viewpoint taken on specific issues.

Like most editorial newsrooms, the approach by most desk editors is neither systematic nor consistent and we recog-nise that setting targets is not an appro-priate approach. At the same time, we recommend that the Guardian engages further with the wider editorial teams on embedding sustainability more deeply, as the departments interviewed tend to respond to readers concerns, rather than engaging directly with the editorial com-ponent of the sustainability vision. We are encouraged to see this focus in the new sustainability strategy.

Two highlights of the year were the 10:10 campaign and the Katine project. The former is an excellent demonstra-tion of the Guardian using its influence in encouraging individuals and organisa-tions to commit to reducing carbon emis-sions by 10% by 2010. The next step will be to evaluate how successful those who joined were in achieving their 10% reduc-tion and report back on the challenges as well as the successes.

Likewise, Katine has been another highly successful demonstration of how the Guardian can use its influence to cata-lyse change. As that project comes to an end, we are encouraged that the Guard-ian is considering how to use its editorial

Auditor’s report: Editorial

prowess, building on the Katine experi-ence, to report more widely on issues of international development.

A deeper change that is already trans-forming the Guardian’s sustainability cov-erage is the move towards mutualisation. Such an inclusive approach is a promising sign that stakeholder engagement, far from being a technical activity under-taken by the sustainability department, is increasingly becoming a dynamic part of daily life of the editorial teams. While some areas may be more active than oth-ers, we believe this has the potential to put stakeholders at the heart of the Guardian’s editorial coverage.


Sudden collapse of advertising market and structural decline in print revenues costs had to be cut urgently across the company

The last financial year (2009/10 – which ended in March) was one of the most testing in Guardian News & Media’s (GNM) recent history.

Two years ago the company was on a more

benign path, with losses moving in the right direction and at levels that could be sustained by parent company Guardian Media Group (GMG), and digital revenues on a strong growth trajectory.

But the sudden collapse in the advertis-ing market, piling on top of the continuing structural decline in print revenues, led to operating losses in 2008/09 of more than £30m, which were not sustainable.

Other media companies also faced very difficult conditions, with pre-tax losses for the Times and the Sunday Times widen-ing to £87.7m for the year to 28 June 2009, from £50.2m in the previous 12 months. Managing director Tim Brooks says the company had to move quickly, including implementing a pay freeze, as the scale of red ink could not be dealt with merely by modest cuts here and there.

Tough action on costs across the com-pany in 2009/10, including 299 redun-dancies, resulted in savings of more than £26m. This meant that underlying operat-ing losses at GNM (of £34.4m) were held at similar levels to those in 2008/09 (£33.7m, despite continued falls in advertising rev-enues.

The company says the full benefits of this work will be seen in the current finan-cial year (2010/11), when operating costs should be 18%, or £50m, lower than the budget for 2009/10. Provided that rev-enues stabilise, this means that GNM’s operating loss will be at sustainable levels in 2010/11.

Brooks says: “The reality is that eve-ryone can cut 5% from their budgets, but that sort of double-digit saving is much more testing and required us to take a fundamental look at costs.”

He says it is hard to overestimate the difficulties GNM was facing, given that losses were running at an average rate of £100,000 a day, at a time when some of the other businesses within Guardian Media Group (GMG) were also facing test-ing times.

GMG Regional Media, which in the past made large profits, had in recent times seen steep falls in its profitability. During

Making GNM’s losses sustainable called for tough action

2009/10 it made a loss. GMG, whose pur-pose is to support the Guardian financially, decided to sell its regional media business to Trinity Mirror during the year, on the basis that GMG did not have the required scale in regional press to return the busi-ness to significant levels of profitability.

There were also losses for GMG as a whole. Pre-tax losses rose sharply by 77% to £171m for the year ending March 2010, although this was primarily due to non-cash impairments of £96.5m in GMG’s investment in Emap and £63.9m in GMG Radio.

The underlying picture for GMG was much brighter: operating losses actually fell due to cost savings and GMG’s com-bined cash balance and investment fund declined by less than 3%. Furthermore, a period of loss for GMG had been anticipated since the sale of 49.9% of Auto Trader pub-lisher Trader Media Group in 2007.

The group’s strategy in recent years, has been to exchange short-term profit for longer-term financial security through investment in assets from which it does not take an immediate return. The group has a valuable portfolio of assets such as its investment fund, its remaining share in Trader Media Group and its stake in Emap to sustain the Guardian in the long-term.

Despite the strength of the group’s port-folio, it was clear at the beginning of the 2009/10 financial year that the situation at GNM was potentially very serious.

“The group monitors how much cash the Guardian is absorbing and whether it is an affordable run-rate, given its duty to keep the Guardian going in perpetuity,” says Brooks. “If we had carried on losing £100,000 a day, we would have eventually gone through absolutely every pound of group money – everyone in the business gets that.”

“The risk was existential,” adds Brooks. “To put it in perspective, we looked at every single option open to us, even extreme measures such as closing the Observer, the world’s oldest Sunday newspaper. It was not a question of tak-ing one or two pages out of the sports sec-tion, and our owners – the Scott Trust and the group board – rightly insisted we take severe action.”

Cutting costs is one thing, but the com-mercial departments are also hunting down new revenue streams to augment the loss of traditional classified and dis-play advertising revenue.

For some media companies, this means monetising their content on the web by erecting paywalls, but GNM has made it clear it does not believe consumers will currently pay for general news content on the web.

The Guardian would find it much more difficult to fulfil its mission of educat-ing and informing if it pushes away its audience, which continues to grow. The monthly number of unique users in March 2010 stood at 33.4 million, a 27.2% increase in the same period the previous year. The number of page views rose 22.9% to 284.6m.

Brooks says: “To be clear, we are not, as we are caricatured by our opponents, ideologically opposed to charging for news – we charge for our papers, after all, and we charge for our iPhone app.

We just believe that our long-term suc-cess means focusing on what consumers want and need, rather than necessarily on what we’d like to be the case. The syl-logism I don’t buy is this one: news is very expensive to produce; my news business needs to make a profit; therefore you are going to pay me for online news. That is a producer-centric, not a consumer-centric, view of the world.”

“Also, the open approach brings great benefits, not just in terms of reach, but also in our ability to compete in the growing digital advertising market – which is now bigger than print; in our ability to link and integrate with other digital services, such Facebook or Twitter and benefits in the salience of our brand.”

So what is GNM doing to ensure it can continue to operate sustainably and to help fund its journalism? One example of a new revenue stream is the creation of the Digital Agency which is producing websites for clients, rather than just sell-ing them advertising. Another is the crea-tion of Guardian Sustainable Business, a venture aimed at supporting companies in acting on their social, environmental and economic impacts.

The business is investing in new soft-ware to enable it to optimise online adver-tising revenues; recruiting like-minded web businesses to Guardian ad Networks, which take advantage of our scale and our special skills in selling to big advertising agencies; opening up new licensing mod-els and new platforms, such as subscrip-tions on Kindle and the Sony eReader.

Both the iPhone app, which is paid for,


and the iPad photography app, which is free because it is sponsored by Canon, are making a positive financial contribution. In fact, the iPhone app had been purchased by 121,000 in its first 16 weeks on sale.

GNM is also looking to significantly expand its international operations, given that our overseas audience represents more than half of our total, but we make only 7% of our revenues from outside the UK.

Alan Rusbridger, editor-in-chief of GNM, points out that the number of users in America has grown enormously: “This readership has found us, rather than the other way round. Our total marketing spend in America in the past 10 years has been $34,000 (£22,500).”

This new commercial environment is a world away from the traditional news-paper model; a single bundle of news and opinion, sold universally at a single price, refreshed once a day or once a week, and subsidised by classified and display adver-tising.

GNM must now deal with complexity in product mix, with multiple sources of revenues at multiple price points – includ-ing free.

Brooks says: “All this means we not only have to remain good at managing com-plexity behind the product, but we now have to get better at managing complexity facing the consumer as well. We have to learn new skills and ways of thinking. No newspaper is currently good at relating to individual consumers because the trans-actions in the past tended to be remote.”

He added: “We need to excel here and one example is the creation of Extra, our reader club, which is all about getting closer to our most loyal readers. It builds on 2009’s successful Subscriber launch, which 45,300 readers had signed up to by March 2010.”

While GNM will increasingly rely on a digital future, it remains committed to its newspapers, despite the fact that sales continue to fall, along with other quality national newspapers, as readers switch to our digital products.

Sales of the Guardian fell by 10.5% in the year ending May 2010 to 300,472, although part of this decline was due to the elimina-tion of 13,000 free bulk copies and a reduc-tion in the European print run of 16,000. The Observer headline sale was 340,247, down 65,269 copies over the same period, or 16.1%. This figure included 21,000 less

bulk copies and 16,000 fewer international sales.

“The biggest thing we have done in the last six months is to relaunch the Observer and that has taken a very large amount of time and effort,” says Brooks. “So the idea that we are not taking our newspapers seriously could not be further from the truth.”What I think is important, though, is to change the language we are using internally.

It’s not a question of print vs digital. We are a multi-platform business and our larg-est revenue platform is print.

“One of the brilliant things about the way editorial is working now is that we are learning how different media can work together. What we recognise is that each platform reinforces the others.”


The Guardian is on the verge of meeting its ambitious aims just four years after we announced our plans

When Guardian News & Media f irst crafted its vision to be the “world’s leading liberal voice” in 2006, there was great

concern around the board table that it was too stretching and even beyond the realms of possibility to achieve.

So it is with a sense, almost of shock, that the Guardian believes it is on the verge of meeting its aim a mere four years later, with the announcement that the New York Times plans to put the majority of its online content behind a pay wall in 2011.

While the Times enjoys a larger audi-ence online, all the evidence suggests that charging for content will lead to a dramatic fall in audience figures. The directors have therefore started a new visioning process that seeks to articulate what a truly mutu-alised Guardian will look like.

Managing director Tim Brooks says: “What has happened is we have realised that what seemed like big steps were actu-ally much smaller than we imagined. We now need to challenge ourselves to go fur-ther and faster.

It’s a weird prospect that we will almost certainly be the world’s leading liberal voice next year as the New York Times says it is going to go behind a paywall.

“When I joined GNM in 2006, the board had really serious debates about whether we should use it as an aspirational phrase as it seemed to some absolutely unachiev-able, but we decided to go ahead because we thought it would be good to have a really stretching ambition as people could understand it.

“We are now at a point where, almost by definition, we need a new vision. The other point to recognise is that the idea of being the ‘leading voice’ is outdated because our whole direction is to create an environment where a great many voices can mingle and gain strength from each other and exchange ideas and new kinds of thinking.”

Alan Rusbridger, editor-in-chief of GNM, makes it clear the Guardian’s rise in popu-larity has not been the result of following the example of other media companies by seeking to boost its ratings artificially: “In an industry where we get used to every trend line pointing to the floor, the growth of newspapers’ digital audience should be

Our quest to become the world’s leading liberal voice

a beacon of hope.During the last three months of 2009,

the Guardian was being read by 37% more people than during the same period in 2008. That’s right, a mainstream media company – you know, the ones that should admit the game’s up because they are so irrelevant and don’t know what they are doing in this new media landscape – has grown its audience by nearly 40% in a year.

“Nor is all this being bought by tricks or by setting chain-gangs of reporters early in the morning to re-write stories about Lady Gaga or Katie Price. In December last year, compared to the same period the previous year, environment was up 206%, Comment is Free up 79%, arts up 78% and politics up 48%.


The Guardian is on the verge of meeting its ambitious aims just four years after we announced our plans

Given the existential threat over the last year, it is unsurprising that much of the Guard-ian’s efforts have been focussed on cutting costs and shoring up revenues. Last year we

stated that “Guardian News and Media is in a privileged position because of its rela-tionship to the Scott Trust and in our view must be seen to both lead the way in devel-oping a new model and at the same time ensuring it is compatible with its sustain-ability vision”. In our view, the Guardian has kept its eye on its values throughout the year. It may have lacked clear strate-gic direction on sustainability at times and governance structures may have been up in the air, but the move to mutualisation, the re-formed sustainability leadership group and the passion of staff, all demon-strate this commitment. Albeit controver-sial, the approach to potential outsourcing of some IT support services also shows a clear commitment to upholding values during tough times.

Auditor’s report: Business strategy


To become an industry leader in sustainability, the ad department has been creating its own vision

The global recession has failed to dent the ambi-tion of GNM’s commer-cial operation to become a leader in sustainability.

A sharp fall in tradi-tional advertising in the past year, combined with

the failure of the Copenhagen climate change summit, means the commercial departments are unlikely to meet their target of growing green and ethical ad rev-enue from 4% of the total in 2009 to 7% by the end of 2010. By the end of 2009-2010 financial year, the average monthly share had increased to 5.4%. We would like to continue to aim for a 7% share by the end of the next financial year.

Carrina Gaffney, GNM’s commercial sustainability manager, said: “Events such as Copenhagen have had an impact on the release of environmental and ethical prod-ucts, services and messages.”

But the economic downturn has acted as a spur to GNM to look for fresh revenue streams in the area of sustainability, lead-ing to the creation of new ventures such as Guardian Sustainable Business (GSB), which has been developed to support sus-tainability professionals, and the Diversity Ad Network, both launched last Decem-ber.

Colin Hughes, the director of the busi-ness-to-business department Guardian Business and Professional, estimates annual revenues approaching £1m from activities related to the environment and sustainability.

“We certainly don’t see sustainable values being in conflict with commercial pressures at all,” he says. “The values of the organisation fit very comfortably with what we do commercially and vice versa.”

With the fast pace of new launches in the commercial department, staff have been given training to deepen their knowl-edge and understanding of how GNM can balance the need to grow business reve-nues while being socially responsible and environmentally regenerative.

More than 100 commercial staff have participated in three-hour sustainability masterclasses over the past year which explore definitions, behaviours, the glo-bal picture and what it means in reality for the company.

Gaffney says: “With all this activity, it is essential that the commercial teams feel

A holistic approach

empowered and informed enough to talk about sustainability with clients.”

As part of its desire to be considered a thought leader, GNM is forming deeper, more strategic relationships with exist-ing clients. This includes working col-laboratively with senior agency staff to discuss the opportunities and challenges facing the creative, marketing and media industries as the UK moves to a low carbon economy.

For example, a low carbon economy breakfast was held in March 2010, which brought together our economics editor, Larry Elliott, and our deputy editor, Ian Katz, with representatives from BLM, Group M, Mediacom, MediaEdge CIA, Mindshare, OMD, PHD and Starcom Medi-avest.

Targeting professionals using GNM’s editorial reputation is increasingly seen as a crucial revenue stream. Guardian Sus-tainable Business, a communications and a market intelligence service aimed at the sustainability and corporate social respon-sibility directors of large companies as well as product managers, directors and mar-keting directors, was launched last year to help them gain a deeper understanding of market trends and regulatory issues.

Research conducted before the launch of GSB showed that more people go to the Guardian than to any other source for envi-ronment news, and that nearly two-thirds of sustainability professionals read the environment content on guardian.co.uk. Of those, 93% rate the content as excellent or good.

In June GSB launched a series of quar-terly business seminars for senior sustain-ability practitioners to facilitate problem-solving and networking, which are sup-ported by founding partners, Oracle, GE and KPMG.

The Green Ad NetworkThe Green Ad Network, which was launched in 2008, has more than 60 sites which draw on the expertise of the Guard-ian’s sales team to sell advertising on their behalf. Revenue from those ads is then shared, fulfilling GNM’s vision of support-ing emerging sustainability companies as well as working with existing large clients. In the past year, the strategy for the Green Ad Network has shifted from an emphasis on growing traffic, to tracking revenue.

The Diversity Ad NetworkThe success of the Green Ad Network led to the creation of the Diversity Ad Net-work, which was launched in December 2009 and now has 24 sites. This network gives recruiters a means of getting their vacancies in front of a more inclusive and diverse pool of candidates. As of June 2010, over 100 jobs have been booked on the network. The revenue from the Diver-sity Ad Network represented 25% of total network revenues in 2009-2010 (which also includes a food network), a qualified success given its launch at the end of the third quarter of last year.

Across the Green and Diversity Ad Net-works we shared in excess of £110,000 of revenue with our publisher partners in the last financial year. We aim to grow reve-nues on these two networks by 93% in the next financial year.

Branded products and servicesPreviously known as Ventures - reader offers, travel and books - branded prod-ucts and services have had a year of highs and lows. Although there were months throughout 2009 when the green and ethi-cal share of revenue exceeded its target of 12%, breakdowns on the Eurostar due to the extreme weather at the end of last year badly affected figures for December and January. The result is that the share of revenue has remained at 9% for this finan-cial year. We are extending the deadline to the end of the 2010-2011 financial year.

The branded products and services team will continue to promote low-carbon modes of transport, such as rail within Europe. It is also encouraging readers to take holidays even closer to home with the launch of its Cottages booking web-site. This year it is looking to co-brand with ethical investment companies for ISAs and start producing high-quality books with an environmental theme.

Guardian Environmental & Sustain-ability JobsThe Guardian Environmental & Sustain-ability Jobs website was relaunched at the end of 2009 to capitalise on the growth in “green collar” jobs as the UK moves towards a low-carbon economy. For the financial year 2009-2010, the contribution from evironmental and sustainability jobs has increased from from 0.9% to 2.1% (in terms of total digital jobs revenue).

Planned initiatives include campaigns


to grow the total number of advertised roles, and partnerships with key employ-ers and consultancies. We will continue to report on the contribution that environ-mental and sustainability jobs make to Guardian Jobs total revenues.

eco:metricsLast year GNM launched its eco:metrics service, a world-first web tool that ena-bles monitoring of CO2 from media sched-ules, such as advertisements and supple-ments. Within GNM, Guardian Branded Partnerships use eoc:metrics and Guard-ian Professional have received training. Guardian Branded Partnerships measure the amount of CO2 emitted per booked campaign, which totalled more than 1000 tonnes from April 2009 – March 2010. This will have been captured under our over-all carbon footprint, which covers energy use, paper supply and travel.

Gaffney says: “Our focus for this year with eco:metrics has been to gather data. Guardian Branded Partnerships teams have included the carbon footprint of each idea on every proposal. In the forthcoming months, the team will analyse this data so we can begin to make sense of the insights that this data can provide and what it might mean for the business.

“In addition, we are looking to use eco:metrics more consistently through-out different areas of the business. This year there will also be a focus and commit-ment to measure the CO2 of our marketing schedules.”

But the take-up throughout the indus-try has not been as enthusiastic as hoped. Gaffney explains: “eco:metrics has been warmly received by both clients and agen-cies. However, the main feedback is that the CO2 data lacks meaning, as they have nothing to benchmark it against. The peo-ple who we work most closely with in ad agencies for example, are not carbon foot-printing experts. This is something we will be working on this year.”

Other sustainability issues mentioned in last year’s report include the Ad Acad-emy, a talent mapping process for career development, and transparency around pay. Little reportable work has been done in these areas, largely due to restructuring in the commercial department.

MarketingA restructuring of the marketing depart-ment means that it has not met its target to “establish sustainability evaluations and environmental tracking of marketing projects”. However, this project has been scheduled for the current financial year ending March 2011.

Guardian Business and Profes-sionalThe targets set by Guardian Business and Professional were also affected by the restructuring of the commercial depart-ments. It was unable to create a list of pre-ferred green suppliers for the printing of publications and its planned community project was delayed until 2010/11.

However, it successfully met its target to “further developing commercial oppor-tunities for supplements/digital content, eg clean tech”. The department secured sponsorship from the Carbon Trust for a clean tech supplement and has increased the offering of digital media solutions, for example the GSB intelligence service.

Rather than offset emissions from its events, the department allocated £800 to each of GNM’s three carbon partners - Con-verging World, Sandbag and Sea Change – over the financial year. It also ran an events team workshop to exchange ideas on best practice, such as the criteria for research-ing venues for our events. However, more work needs to be done on creating a list of preferred suppliers.


Advertising is a key source of revenue, but when its message conflicts with with our editorial principles, should we ban the offending ads?

The heart of the Guardian’s vision to be carbon posi-tive lies in the ability of our editorial coverage to change the behaviour of individuals, companies and governments.

But while on the one hand we are calling on people to reduce their environmental impacts, are we undoing some of this good work through the advertising we carry, that encourages consumption?

Some of our readers and users certainly believe this is the case. For example, a blogpost on our Living our Values website debating our carbon positive approach, drew this response from one user: “The point has been raised before in many other places - but I feel it is vital to point it out here again - ADVERTISING AND PROMO-TION OF CARBON INTENSIVE ACTIVITY.

“By all means try and calculate the impact of your editorials on climate change - but also make damn sure you include the impacts of all your features on holidaying on the other side of the world, and adverts and reviews for cars and all sorts of other carbon intensive products.

“In order to run the adverts, and write the articles on these (particularly long-haul holidays) somebody at the paper MUST believe that these are influencing people’s holiday patterns.

“When they are run close to any article suggesting people shouldn’t do this sort of thing, then you run into a dangerous area of promoting cognitive dissonance.”

We know this is an issue that is keenly felt because a survey of key stakeholders commissioned by the media industry in 2008 showed that ‘responsible advertis-ing’ is a new issue to have emerged since a previous stakeholder engagement exer-cise six years ago.

The report on behalf of the Media CSR Forum, which includes the Guardian as a member, did conclude that it is a particu-larly difficult to address as it is so subjec-tive in nature: “The issue is not new for advertising agencies familiar with indus-try specific codes and laws. This becomes problematic when the notion of what is safe, such as products and services that may or not be beneficial to the environ-ment, becomes subjective.”

To discuss this topic openly, an internal staff debate was organised in June 2009 between columnist George Monbiot, who

Should advertisers be held to account?

has openly criticised newspapers for fail-ing to ban certain adverts, our commercial director, Adam Freeman, and our editor-in-chief, Alan Rusbridger.

Rusbridger told the audience of com-mercial and editorial staff that certain advertising did involve “a certain degree of holding your nose” but that it gives us the funding to pay for our journalism.

He said: “I am with John Stuart Mill, the philosopher of free speech. The best argument to debate is more debate and so if people want to buy the space in the papers in order to make their case fine, but we will never shy away from disrupt-ing them and doing the incredibly vital job that George [Monbiot] and the other environmental writers are doing. Our jour-nalism will always be more powerful than any advertising.”

He also said that Monbiot’s recommen-dation to ban adverts for direct flights and high emission cars would be the thin edge of the wedge and would lead to demands to stop other advertising, leading to a posi-tion where it would be impossible to carry on the investigative journalism that holds power to account.

Some editorial staff remain unhappy, with one senior editor of the environment site expressing concern that our journal-istic content gets tainted by advertising, especially when we form closer bonds with advertisers through sponsorship deals.

Monbiot wrote a blog on our envi-ronment site after the event in which he described advertising a “pox on the planet”. “It is one of the forces driving us towards destruction, as it creates needs that did not exist before and promotes consumption way beyond sustainable levels.

“I also recognise that it pays my wages. Without it, newsspapers would not exist, certainly not in their current form, almost certainly not at all. For all their evident faults, newspapers perform a crucial democratic service. Without profes-sional reporting, it is impossible to make informed decisions.

“It looks as if we are stuck with the advertising model. The Guardian’s jour-nalism costs much more than the price readers pay for the paper. Online articles – like this one – cost you nothing at all. They are, in effect, wholly sponsored by advertising. If we changed that, how many of you would pay?”

“I am not calling on the newspapers to

stop taking advertising. I can’t, because I haven’t found an acceptable alternative.

“What I am asking is for the newspa-pers to refine their view of which adver-tisements are and are not acceptable. Specifically, I am calling on them in the first instance to drop ads for cars which produce more than 150g of CO2/km, and to drop direct advertising for flights, on the grounds that both these products cause unequivocal and unnecessary harm to the environment.”

Freeman used the debate to say that while he was broadly in agreement with Monbiot on the need to think carefully about what advertising was responsible, it was important to understand that GNM’s major clients are going through a transi-tion phase and that advertising consid-ered acceptable today may not be in the future.

He believes that a more creative response than banning ads would to see how GNM can be more supportive to those compa-nies who are marketing greener products. He said that most of the advertising for cars in the Guardian was already for lower emitting cars as the whole industry was moving that way anyway, and that any decision to ban ads would not have made any difference.

“George’s views are broadly valid and something we need to think about,” he said. “We are in a transition and there is a recognition we cannot go on consuming at the same rate. We want to work with and support the companies which are chang-ing.

“There are brands we may want to stop working with in the future but we would need to develop a proper benchmarking system. We don’t want to have a knee jerk reaction.”

There are no current plans to develop such a system.

A survey of nearly 3,000 readers and users of the Guardian, Observer and guard-ian.co.uk in May 2009 showed that many of our readers and users do feel we have a responsibility to refuse to carry adver-tising in certain areas, but their primary concern is adverts for music that contain offensive lyrics and those that use sexual imagery.

Far lower amongst their concerns are adverts for those companies that are most associated with climate change. Only around a tenth of our readers and web users believe we should refuse to carry


ads for budget airlines and around a fifth for oil companies.

More than a quarter of web users and a fifth of newspaper readers do not object to any of the categories we listed.

Our managing director, Tim Brooks, also believes it is wrong to impose censorship on advertising. He said: “I think that it’s actually not sophistry to apply to adver-tising the thoughts that CP Scott applied to editorial that it was important to hear ones enemies as well as ones friends. We actively solicit views which editors would not agree with and trust our read-ers to make up their own minds. The same should be true of our advertising.

“Beyond this, the issues are very com-plex and it is very difficult to set ourselves up as judge and jury for every advertiser we carry.”


Last year we stated: “It is rare to find a sales and mar-keting function that has embraced sustainability with such vigour.” And this has not changed. However, the business climate has changed and this has led to

several of commercial’s sustainability tar-gets not being met. We accept that a delay to the deadline for some targets is a reason-able response. We also find that ambitious growth plans for sustainable advertising network revenues are indicative of the increasing importance of sustainability-related revenue to the commercial side of the Guardian’s operations. The launch of diversity-related services and Guardian Sustainable Business show how embed-ded sustainability is in this part of the business.

As the editorial department’s approach to mutualisation develops, we believe it will be important for the commercial departments to determine how they will adapt to this new world. Some steps have already been taken, such as open plat-form. As this approach accelerates, it will become increasingly important not just to find new revenue streams, but to ensure they are aligned to the Guardian’s values.

There is a continuing need to ensure that the eco:metrics’ underlying data is sufficiently robust to enable clients to make reliable decisions about choices based on CO2 impact.

Auditor’s report: Commercial


After a difficult year of restructuring and redundancy, there is a need to reunify staff around the organisation’s core values

There is no getting away from the fact that GNM’s redundancy programme and restructuring over the past year has been traumatic from the per-spective of our staff.

More than 120 employ-ees, split equally between commercial and editorial, left the company in the six months ending May 2010. Many have described leaving in terms of losing their family or experiencing a relationship break-up.

The total GNM headcount in June 2010 stood at 1,580, 299 below its peak the year before.

While job losses are difficult in any circumstances, they have been felt more keenly at GNM as its ownership by the Scott Trust has meant the company has been able largely to avoid the shedding of employees in past economic downturns.

The contraction was also made difficult by the fact that many staff at GNM have a great sense of loyalty to the organisation and see their contribution as serving a pur-pose rather than simply doing a job.

The creative culture and sense of free-dom mean that they enjoy working at the Guardian and often remain with the com-pany for many years.

This has been shown time and again through the results of the annual staff sur-vey, with the latest questionnaire showing that 86% of our staff express pride in work-ing for the company, way above industry norms, and that 93% go above and beyond their basic job requirements.

Perhaps most controversial amongst staff has been the decision in principle by the company to outsource two areas of the business, technology support and the department which looks after editorial supplements (see outsourcing section).

As a result of all these changes, the director of consumer media, Adam Free-man, acknowledges that “some staff have fallen out of love with the Guardian and we now need to work hard to bring everyone back together”.

The restructuring has resulted in our values becoming something of a battle-ground rather than a unified call to action, with the two main unions, the National Union of Journalists and Unite, accusing management of turning their backs on our fundamental belief in “honesty, cleanness [integrity], courage, fairness, a sense of

Caught between culture and commercial pressures

duty to the reader and the community”.The managing director, Tim Brooks,

denies the charge: “I don’t accept the accusation that we have abandoned our values. There is nothing in the values that says we are obliged to keep employment at a particular level or that we are obliged not to address our costs.

“We have had no choice but to take a very large bite out of our costs. Through-out this process, we have striven to be hon-est with people by being very clear up front about the size and nature of the problem and that we needed to become a smaller operation.”

Brooks acknowledges the need to pre-serve what makes the culture special at GNM, but says that within our perceived strengths also lie weaknesses which could make the organisation ill-suited to the demands and rigours of a 21st century media organisation.

“I think when you go through difficult times, people talk about the company culture with great affection and that it is a wonderful thing,” Brooks said. “But in other circumstances staff can be quite quick to criticise that culture.

“In the staff survey, people say they are not consulted enough about decisions that affect their work and on the other hand that there are too many meetings and decision-making is too slow.

“Both of those I am sure are true. One reflects the strength of the culture, which is consultative and informal, while one reflects a weakness which is that we are very slow to respond to what has become a fast-changing media landscape.

“One of the things that keeps this com-pany’s culture alive is that people join out of their love for what our journalism represents. That is incredibly positive in terms of corporate spirit and leads to staff staying here for a very long time. One of the less positive aspects of this is that we have been very averse to change and very unwelcoming of new people.

“Faithfulness to the values and vision of the company as well as respect for the past and its achievements remain impor-tant, but our insular focus means we can be slow to adopt best practice because we are just not cognisant of it and we can be slow to listen to dissenting voices because consensus is so important.

“Yet in our journalism we are constantly challenging and questioning of everything. So if you ask what is the one thing I hope

will have changed from the reorganisation of the past year it is that we will be quicker at making decisions in future.”

Brooks says the abiding principle by which the restructuring process has been managed has been one of fairness. Employees had raised this as one of their key concerns in the staff survey.

He points out that when management was reviewing the first round of redundan-cies in 2008, it became clear that the vast majority of cuts had been amongst junior staff. As a result, the company abolished a number of positions on the board and amongst senior managers.

“It is for others to judge whether we have been fair but we have striven to be so,” Brooks said. “Of the redundancies, more than 10% have been within senior management roles. It is right that we were proportionate and not just cutting from the bottom.”

The number of board directors has been progressively cut from 16 to 10 over the past three years and Brooks believes this smaller team makes it easier to ensure all parts of the business are aligned to a com-mon purpose and can communicate more effectively.

Voluntary redundancies have been sought wherever possible and Brooks said GNM had worked hard to support staff placed at risk by looking for redeployment within the company. In some instances, additional volunteers for redundancy were sought in certain areas in a bid to cre-ate a redeployment opportunity for those at risk of redundancy but who wanted to stay with the company. In fact, almost a third of those whose posts were closed found alternative work within GNM.

Those that did leave GNM from the com-mercial departments were offered career transition support through an external company called Rialto. This included five, individual, face-to-face sessions of focused support with a consultant over a three month period, followed by a further two months of support via telephone and email. Staff were also eligible for a retrain-ing grant of £750. This was not applicable to editorial staff as redundancies were on a voluntary basis.

The feedback from Rialto is that this level of support goes above and beyond what many companies offer staff affected by redundancy.

Brooks wants to get across to staff that while the company has been through a


period of profound difficulty, it is not going to settle back to a period of calm and the pace of rapid change is likely to continue.

He said: “People get to the point psy-chologically where they want to believe we have finished that process. But we will never finish changing and we are now doing a lot of work to see how we can help people from all the different departments become more comfortable that change will be ongoing.”

He hopes to do this by ratcheting up the company’s learning and development pro-gramme to support staff in learning new specialist skills as well as recruiting new skills into the business.

To achieve this, GNM has merged the HR department and the Organisational Devel-opment Unit to create one new depart-ment which will include a dedicated tal-ent and development team whose job will be to identify both internal and external talent and to develop all staff in order to close the gap between our skills and busi-ness priorities.


GNM needs a radically new strategy if it is to become a leader in workplace equality and diversity and a relevant voice for its readership as a whole

The Guardian and Observer have a somewhat cheq-uered history when it comes to embedding diversity into the organi-sation.

In principle, it should be easy for us. After all,

we are a media organisation committed to social justice, which at its heart is all about equality of opportunity for all sec-tions of society and giving a voice to the voiceless.

But despite creating new processes and having a diversity champion and diversity manager in place over the past few years, progress has been too little and too slow.

Our last sustainability report detailed how an internal review by a diversity con-sultant had shown that our considerable investment in diversity had actually had the opposite effected to that intended;it marginalised the development of equality and diversity, and limited its effectiveness and impact.

In terms of the media industry in gen-eral, benchmark exercises have shown that we fare reasonably well, but that is hardly a comfort given that there are few companies in the world of media that are shining examples of good practice.

In an attempt to step the process of change up a gear, GNM has employed a new head of diversity, Yasir Mirza, who is reporting directly to the managing direc-tor, Tim Brooks.

Mirza wants to put diversity at the heart of GNM’s business strategy, embedding the social, business, and legal case across all departments.

Brooks recognises the importance of achieving this goal: “Unless we vigorously reflect the diversity of the people we cater to, the extent we fail to do that will be the extent to which we fail to be a sustainable business in the long term.”

Beyond the importance of reflecting the diversity of British society in our con-tent, it also makes commercial sense. For example, the Guardian launched an online diversity advertising jobs network in 2010. That can only be truly successful if we are attracting a broad range of people to our website.

After his first few months in the job, Mirza’s initial analysis was that the main preoccupation within GNM had in the past been to concentrate on the “numbers game in recruitment”, which he believes

Putting all people first

highlights a “shallow” understanding of what diversity is all about.

Mirza says the numbers game is superfi-cial because unless we address deep-seated cultural issues we could end up employing minority staff who just replicate the exist-ing dominant socio-economic staff mix. That is not diversity.

He also points out that with large-scale redundancies in response to structural changes in the industry, any opportunities to change the nature of the organisation through recruitment will be limited in the foreseeable future.

Mirza’s strategy, and much of his effort, is on seeking to improve the balance of our editorial content, and extending the breadth and depth of voices we use, whilst also ensuring we practice what we preach by mirroring good practices internally. This he feels is paramount in creating a pull factor of having a more diverse work-force in the future. This is a strategy that is aimed at gaining substantive long term results.

For this reason, Mirza has ditched a number of the 32 recommendations for change made by a diversity consultant in 2008/09, which focussed largely on recruitment, and has also amended one of the five board objectives that were set at the same time. Rather than concentrate on utilising flexible working to achieve busi-ness objectives, Mirza has changed this to improving the culture of the organisation to be more inclusive.

Following an update of our diversity performance in a blogpost in January 2010, our auditors Two Tomorrows pointed out that back in 2003 the company was making similar commitments and at the time said it would “be judged on actions and results rather than well-meaning intentions”.

While Two Tomorrows pointed to an increase in workforce ethnic diversity from 9% to 12% since 2004 as a sign of positive change, the recent redundancy programme has eradicated nearly all those gains with figures showing that in June 2010 it had fallen back to 9.3%

Two Tomorrows concluded: “Percep-tions of readers on ethnic coverage and the level of ethnic readership has shown little in the way of improvement, that lat-ter showing the company languishing well behind some other quality newspapers.

“In this context, the shift of focus away from recruitment to a more ‘embedded’ approach makes sense, and we have seen

evidence that there is real top-level com-mitment to this drive. We commend the commitment at a time when the harsh commercial realities are demanding immediate attention of the leadership.

“Only time will tell if it succeeds, and we will be looking to see ‘results rather just well-meaning intentions’”.

A number of projects are now under-way, and GNM has begun to produce some of the results it is aiming for:

The Diversity Ambassador pro-grammeSixty community champions/organisa-tions covering all equality strands were invited to GNM to learn about GNM diver-sity strategy in June. The aim is for these champions to act as “ambassadors” on behalf of the Guardian in promoting the paper, creating direct links with marginal-ised communities about our editorial cov-erage, and casting our net far and wide in promoting careers at GNM through trusted sources. The hope is that this will create a two-way dialogue between GNM and these communities, present new channels for editorial content by and on minority groups, and career promotion at GNM.

Diversity information for staffAn internal hub of diversity reference material dedicated to each strand of diver-sity was launched in July to give staff up-to-date information on the company’s strategy and policies. The site also lists a database of 450 ambassador organisa-tions, legislation updates, best practice, diversity events, as well as a religious calendar. The aims are to create a useful tool to help foster a culture of inclusion internally, and to provide a useful external contacts tool for editors and journalists to tap into a wide range of minority groups in an attempt to provide authentic coverage and representation of such groups.

Minority Media conferencesThe Guardian and Observer editorial department has been organising a series of Minority Media conferences to better understand how we can improve the rep-resentation of marginalised groups in our editorial coverage, and to help to get their voices into the mainstream. This is core to the Guardian’s liberal principles of social equality and giving a voice to the voice-less. By January 2011, editorial will have organised four separate workshops with


experts from black minority ethnic; Mus-lim; lesbian, gay and bisexual; disabled; Jewish; Hindu and Sikh communities.

Minority Writers workshopsIn an attempt to encourage new writers from diverse backgrounds for various sections of the Guardian, we have started running Minority Writers’ workshops with commissioning editors. The sessions serve several functions:

• To inform new writers on how to approach commissioning editors with ideas• To explore ways of encouraging more writers from minority backgrounds to write for the Guardian• To provide an opportunity for minority writers to pitch their ideas• To create a link between new writers and Guardian editors• To provide an opportunity for editors to become more conscious of diversity and inclusion issues of minority communi-ties

The programme of events is already starting to bear fruit. In the wake of the initial workshop in February, the Guard-ian agreed to six new commissions from minority writers within the G2 features section and the Comment is Free website. A further two commissions emerged from the first Minority Media conference with the black and Muslim communities held a month later.

GNM’s diversity objectives1. To increase the diversity of our UK users2. To strengthen our ability to create dis-tinctive output and business services through diversity3. To increase the diversity of the work-force including the board and heads of department4. To build diversity measures into per-formance management5. To improve the culture of the organisa-tion to be more inclusive


The failure to embed diversity and inclusiveness within GNM has been highlighted in two staff surveys undertaken in the past year

The main staff survey in September last year showed that a lot more needs to be done to ensure that everyone feels val-ued and respected.

One member of staff commented in the survey

that “GNM tries hard as an organisation to be inclusive and encourage diversity, but there is a significant challenge due to the highly networked nature of the culture”.

Others were more blunt. One wrote: “There is a liberal ‘facade’ presented to the outside world but indoors it feels coldly conservative on this issue [diversity] and it’s agonising and very painful to be so unrepresented at senior management in this company.”

It was the board’s recognition of the lack of progress in these matters that led to the appointment of a new head of diversity, Yasir Mirza, who reports directly to the managing director, Tim Brooks.

In conversations with staff held after his appointment, Mirza discovered a strong feeling that it was difficult to progress if you don’t have the right personality and working styles.

Brooks wrote in a blogpost to staff in November 2009: “As you can see from the scores, our non-white staff score us lower for diversity and inclusion than do our white staff. Nor is it just a matter of race or ethnicity; 32 people said they had suf-fered disadvantage at GNM as a result of their gender, for instance (although this was a dramatic improvement on the score last time).”

In the wake of the staff survey, the issues were explored in more detail in four work-shops run by external consultants, held in January. The workshops exposed serious concerns across the company. The consult-ants were surprised that the sense of lack of achievement was as keenly felt amongst senior managers and board directors as it was amongst more junior staff.

To deepen the inquiry and see if the views at the workshops were more gener-ally held, a specific diversity survey for all staff was launched in March by our head of diversity, who felt “we needed to dig deeper to identity what the real problems are”. With 500 responses, the results rep-resented the views of just under a third of the 1,600-strong workforce.

Mirza said this further confirmed the findings of the earlier workshops: “This

Exploring the culture at GNM

survey was needed to highlight some of the deep-seated cultural issues we have, and importantly to provide an evidence base for such issues. No organisation is perfect, but a good sign in creating real change is to first recognise what it is we are actually dealing with and bringing the unconscious culture to the consciousness.”

This has been the problem in the past, Mirza feels: “Although senior management are committed to inclusion, they did not fully understand what this actually means and how this concept translates into their respective teams and business areas.”

Mirza presented these findings at a half-day workshop to the board and sen-ior managers from across all departments in June, using the session to explore ways of acting on the deficits and creating a positive cultural shift. We will report on subsequent actions in our sustainability reporting blog and in next year’s audit.

The lowest score in the survey was that only 11% of staff feel minority groups are well represented at a senior level in GNM. This is not a great surprise given that there is no ethnic minority representation among the 10 board directors, and there are only three women, two of whom have recently resigned to join new employers.

The sense that the Guardian is an exclu-sive club is also felt strongly, with nearly three-quarters saying you have to be in with the right people to get ahead and nearly two-thirds of staff feeling they have to conform “to the way things are done around here” in order to progress.

Of the respondents, 44% say they feel they work in an inclusive and diverse environment with slightly fewer believ-ing the company is progressing in this area, even though 61% believe that GNM is committed to promoting inclusivity and diversity.

At the same time, fewer staff say they have been negatively affected by the lack of inclusiveness. Just under 70% say their career has not been held back unfairly for any reason, while two-thirds have not experienced discrimination, exclusion or bias during their time with the company.


The decision to explore subcontracting two key support areas of GNM’s business proved a controversial move

The most contentious issue GNM faced internally in 2009-2010 was the deci-sion to consider outsourc-ing some of the activities of two key support areas within the business.

The move towards using an external supplier to provide tech-nology support and a separate company to design and print the company’s non-core editorial supplements, such as the special-ist A5 guides, was met with resistance by staff.

More than 900 employees, more than half the total, signed a petition calling for the company to scrap plans to outsource technology support and the Unite union boycotted the group charged with plan-ning the changeover.

Our managing director, Tim Brooks, said at an all-staff briefing in May that the move was not simply about cutting costs, but would also help GNM to be more flex-ible, reduce risk and focus efforts on its core activities.

Recognising the sensitivity of outsourc-ing technology support, GNM engaged its independent auditors, Two Tomorrows, to provide assurance to the company and its key stakeholders that, from a “respon-sible sourcing” perspective, there were no major flaws in the process and that it was been applied in a thorough and consistent manner.

Two Tomorrows provided an interim report on the first two stages of the tender this spring. Their recommendations were incorporated and they were asked to do a final review in the autumn, once the proc-ess was complete.

Their interim report said: “Unite has expressed concerns that ‘outsourcing of staff in this way would be counter to the ethical principles of the Scott Trust’. In response to the petition, Tim Brooks has explained the management approach to what the Scott Trust Values mean on his blog post on the company intranet, Spike, and openly disclosed the reasons for Enterprise Technology department to examine outsourcing.

“While nothing came to our attention to show that the Scott Trust values have been breached, we recommend GNM continues to offer channels of engagement with staff and unions and seeks clarification from them of any remaining concerns that the Scott Trust values are not being met.

An outcry over outsourcing

“GNM has responded to our recom-mendations for incorporating stakeholder concerns, such as climate change, diver-sity and unionisation into the supplier workshops. We believe that the workshop process was effective at assessing the sup-plier’s approach to these issues. However, the scoring system did not separate out these issues in a manner that enables us to assess the specific scores from all the workshops.”

“In response to our recommendations, GNM is also involving those responsible for managing its key sustainability issues in phase three to directly work with suppli-ers in understanding and appraising their policies, performance, and targets regard-ing climate change, HR and diversity. We anticipate this will provide an effective way to embed sustainability considera-tions into the final stages of the supplier selection.”

Brooks said the way GNM had addressed the technology outsourcing was an exam-ple of the company living up to its values, especially its belief in fairness.

“Under British law, if work is transferred from company ‘a’ to company ‘b’ and an employee doesn’t want to work for the new supplier, he or she is deemed to have resigned,” he said. “We took the position that we would not impose this and that if any staff did not want to join the new company they could take redundancy on enhanced terms.

“When we asked the preferred bidder for the tech outsourcing, and one of the world’s largest such firms, whether there was anything unusual about our contract they said they had never encountered a company that gives the choice of redun-dancy. This is a good example of trying to be fair to people.”

Referring to the staff petition, Brooks said: “It’s important to understand what staff think about issues but also impor-tant to recognise that responsibility for decision making rests with the board. We understand the strength of feeling and at the same time if you stopped the average employee in the corridor and asked them what was happening and what was at issue, they would not really have known as they were not close to the matter.

“Also the petition question was skewed as it suggested outsourcing would lead to poorer service and the loss of jobs. It was a piece of campaigning. If you ask a friend and colleague to sign a petition to

“save” your job, then of course they would sign.”


Strong chapels protected most employees during a time of significant upheaval but concerns remain about ethics and accountability in the boardroom, writes the NUJ’s Seumas Milne

The Guardian and Observer are different from other mainstream newspa-pers, websites and media organisations in essen-tial ways. That’s not only because of their generally more progressive and plu-

ralist editorial policy. It’s also, crucially, because of how they’re owned. The role of the Scott Trust not only means that all profits are reinvested in the titles, but that they are protected from takeover and their editorial independence is guaranteed.

The ownership structure also allows both GNM and GMG to be run in a differ-ent way, focused on the Trust’s core aims and the needs of their workforce and read-ers. That has been reflected in the period of economic crisis, during which we have been able to negotiate far-reaching change while protecting the basic terms and con-ditions of journalists.

But both unions at GNM believe there has also been a growing tendency at board level to make decisions that are seriously at odds with Guardian values – and that significant reforms are needed at Trust level to improve accountability and trans-parency.

The new Guardian and Observer NUJ chapel, formed from a merger in 2009, represents more than 95% of journalists at GNM and is by far the biggest stakeholder in the company. The chapel has a collective bargaining role over pay and conditions, but it also represents the collective views of journalists on wider issues and works in close cooperation with those members of staff represented by Unite.

Immediately after its formation, the new chapel played a central role in the campaign to save the Observer and its editorial autonomy. Since then, under the impact of the crisis and large-scale losses, it has negotiated a significant reduction in the size of the editorial workforce through voluntary redundancy and protected rede-ployment — just as it earlier negotiated the complex integration of paper and online workforces.

The loss of many highly valued mem-bers of staff, wider cuts and increased pressure on those that remain have been difficult, but the give-and-take process of negotiated change has also been a posi-tive measure of what can be achieved with strong unions and a common interest in the development of the titles in a rapidly

GNM sustainability report: State of the unions

changing media environment.There are, however, other changes

that have been, or are being, imposed elsewhere in the company that have not reflected that spirit. These include large-scale compulsory redundancies and cuts in pay and conditions for more vulnerable parts of the workforce through outsourc-ing, which both the NUJ and Unite chapels believe could threaten editorial integrity.

There is also a deeper concern among the journalists and wider workforce about the way GMG and GNM have been run in recent years. That is focused primarily on the rapid inflation of boardroom salaries, pension top-ups and bonuses: a develop-ment that has resumed in 2010 and has been the cause of almost universal anger among editorial and other staff. These arrangements are very widely regarded in the company as the product of a cosy, corporate culture and a violation of Guard-ian and Scott Trust values — rather than a response to genuine problems in recruit-ing and retaining staff.

Along with other far-reaching GMG financial and corporate decisions it has challenged in recent years, the NUJ regards the indulgence of boardroom excess and bonus culture partly as a reflection of inad-equate accountability and transparency in the Scott Trust — seen as dominated to a counterproductive extent by GMG and GNM management.

The chapel believes there needs to be significant governance reform if these problems are to be overcome, including the opening up of representation on the Trust, as well as greater collective partici-pation by staff in company decision-mak-ing. And it welcomes the fact that the Trust has now begun to review executive pay criteria and agreed to open the dialogue with the chapel it has been proposing for the past decade.


With a major print and online presence, IT expertise is essential, which is why the trade union is trying to keep it in house

In a troubled year outsourcing is a threat that has loomed large for over 100 staff. The Unite chapel now finds itself in dispute with the management of GNM over plans to outsource large numbers of staff in the wages office, the creative department and the technology

enterprise department.The financial crisis the country has

been struggling with has undoubtedly exacerbated the economic problems that GNM faces due to structural changes in the newspaper sector. Unite recognises that changes need to be made to address these problems but the chapel feels very strongly that the move to outsource is a mistake.

At a recent company briefing, Tim Brooks referred to the two affected depart-ments as not enhancing GNM’s core pur-pose and he argued that the work our staff do can be better done by specialist com-panies. Our colleagues felt undervalued by these comments and believe that he is wrong on both scores.

The NUJ has taken the lead in defend-ing the staff in the creative department. Unite has taken the lead in the discussions over staff in the technology department, though we liaise very closely on both issues.

Our argument is straightforward. Tech-nology is absolutely core to the work that GNM does as both a newspaper and online publisher. GNM wins plaudits every year for its vision and innovation and this is a direct consequence of the dedication, imagination and skills of staff who have chosen to make their career in this com-pany.

We firmly believe that GNM manage-ment are completely mistaken if they believe that a company based in India, such as their proposed partner, would be able to deliver anything like the same qual-ity of service, dedication and commitment no matter how tempting their sales pitch sounds.

There is a strong likelihood that, the vast majority of those facing outsourcing will take up GNM’s offer of enhanced redun-dancy terms, rather than transferring to the new company. If these staff go they will take with them not just a real commit-ment to GNM and its values but also years of experience and detailed knowledge of highly bespoke and specialised systems, not to mention relationships with both

Outsourcing has become a bone of contention at the Guardian

commercial and editorial staff they have collaborated with over many years.

The company that comes in will have one primary aim – to make a profit out of GNM. We believe that the majority of posts transferred to the oursourced com-pany will disappear overseas to become, at best, a disconnected voice on the end of a phone. Those based in the London area and those remaining in the office itself will be taken by staff whose first commitment is to the outsourced company.

Our final point is that this move is in contradiction to the values espoused by the Scott Trust. Tim Brooks again speaks of the need to save money. He believes that it is possible to do so right away, though we would argue that most outsourcing projects fail to make their projected sav-ings and this will be no different. But the real focus for GNM management is to reduce fixed costs – which include per-manent staff and the pensions, sickness benefits and other costs they incur. We believe this move to outsource is part of a tendency to increasing use of short term and fixed term contracts and presages fur-ther moves to outsource elsewhere in the company.

Our members have had to endure a pay freeze and redundancies while directors of GNM and GMG have taken an average of 30% pay rises, plus a pension and bonus payment averaging at least 24% of their basic salary. This takes our outgoing chief executive Carolyn McCall’s salary from £498,000 in 2009 to £658,000 in 2010, with a hefty £152,000 pension contribu-tion. Tim Brooks, the managing direc-tor of GNM, has to get by on an increase from £256,000 to £330,000 with a mere £80,000 pension contribution. Both sala-ries included performance related com-ponents – bonuses by any other name. As far as we are aware, only Alan Rusbridger took a voluntary 10% pay cut and declined to take a bonus, taking his salary down to £411,000.

And our concerns are echoed by staff across the company. In an election year where every vote should count, just short of 900 members of staff from every part of the business signed a petition protesting against these moves in an attempt by all employees to demonstrate to the manage-ment the feelings of staff.

On 5 May, the anniversary of the Guard-ian’s first edition, the Unite chapel pub-lished an open letter to the GNM board

calling for a change of course and quoting C P Scott: “Whether on the editorial, or business, or even what may be regarded as the mechanical side – this also vitally important in its place – nothing should sat-isfy short of the best ... it is here that ability counts and that character counts, and it is on these that a newspaper, like every great undertaking, if it is worthy of its power and duty, must rely.”

If outsourcing goes ahead we believe that GNM management will have made a strategic mistake it will come to regret, one which its staff in their majority reject and which we believe you, it’s readers, would also question. We urge management to reconsider and sit down with Unite and the NUJ to discuss alternative ways of dealing with GNM’s current financial dif-ficulties.

Finally, with the passing of another year, Mike Pike, the usual author of these lines and our longstanding father of the chapel, retired in February, after 23 years in the role. As a result of restructuring and redundancies we also lost a number of other members of our chapel, including another stalwart of the chapel committee, Stephanie Kerstein. We wish them all the very best for the future.


While budget reductions have led to a difficult process of redundancies, GNM has been working hard to address issues of raised by the last staff survey

The latest GNM staff survey was carried out in early Autumn last year during a first round of restruc-turing, but before a more radical cost-cutting pro-gramme that led to a fur-ther 120 job losses.

While the results showed continuing high scores in key areas such as pride in working for GNM (see employee section), the same concerns that were raised in pre-vious surveys surfaced again; lack of trans-parency on pay, lack of clarity about career opportunities and a desire for more active performance management.

While our managing director, Tim Brooks, is committed to addressing these issues, the radical restructuring of the company has meant that at the time of publication of this report, the company has so far been unable to focus on them.

Brooks said: “Two of the lowest scores on the survey were ‘I understand how my pay is determined’, and ‘selection for internal jobs is fair’. The most disap-pointing thing about these poor marks is that they have been like this for years. We obviously are not doing enough here and we must and will do more. We have taken some steps, for instance by publishing our pay policy on Spike, and also publish-ing the details of the industry salary sur-vey, which we use for benchmarking our salaries here. Clearly it is not particularly easy to address issues around pay during a pay freeze. We have however published the rules of the freeze – that pay will only increase for those receiving promotion to an advertised new role, or those to whom a promise was made prior to the freeze – and we have adhered to those rules. We have also provided all staff with online reward statements, which make the value of their compensation package more transparent, and have introduced a range of voluntary benefits, such as the ability to purchase additional holiday.

“Concerns about the selection for inter-nal jobs reflects a deep-seated perception that roles are filled without being adver-tised, and often from outside the organi-sation. Steps have been taken to address this, including ensuring that vacancies should be advertised internally for at least two weeks. More than nine out of ten roles filled since August 2009 have fulfilled this requirement. Of the 304 appointments made in the 12 months to September, 53%

Staff matters on the table

went to internal candidates, compared to 32% in the previous year. So we are mak-ing progress – but clearly it is not visible to many of our staff and there is still room for more improvement.”

One success over the past year has been an increase in the number of appraisals for staff. After years of missing its targets, the company achieved its aim of ensuring that by December last year 80% of commercial staff received formal feedback. This com-pares with 60% during the previous year.

The editorial departments missed their target of 25% appraisals, achieving a rate of 16.9% in 2009. The target for the cur-rent calendar year has been raised to 40%. Just over two-thirds of all staff who had an appraisal said they found it useful.

The survey was completed by 69%, or 1211 employees, compared with 70% the previous year.

On the question of whether GNM as an organisation lives up the Scott Trust values, there was a more positive score of 58%, compared with 54% in 2008. There was however a higher percentage, 21%, who actively disagree.

Analysing the data, editorial staff are more cynical about GNM’s adherence to Scott Trust values than their commercial colleagues. This was, in part, caused by uncertainty at the time over the future of the Observer newspaper.

The survey showed there was a wide-spread acceptance of the need for the com-pany to respond to the extremely difficult economic climate, with 86% agreeing that restructuring and cost-cutting have been necessary to respond to changes in the media industry.

There was a lack of confidence expressed, however, that the restructuring and cost-cutting will be fairly handled. Concern was also expressed that reductions in staffing will lead to more stress for those remain-ing, although 70% of employees said their workload was acceptable.

In a blog to staff on the company intranet when the results were published, Brooks wrote: “I am proud of the results, and by that I mean proud because the results recognisably portray the extraordinar-ily talented, committed, thoughtful and creative people who work here, across all departments of the business. The scores emphasise how much you enjoy work-ing here, how much what we are trying to achieve means to you, and how much effort you put in to those achievements.

“Some people – among them friends of mine who do similar jobs to me in other media companies – thought we were bonk-ers to be conducting the staff survey at a time of major reorganisation, cuts and redundancies. But why take someone’s temperature when they are feeling fine? Taking it when they are stressed tells you much more. And actually what this sur-vey tells us – both from the scores them-selves, many of which are as high or higher than in previous surveys – and from the participation rate, which is only one per-centage point below last time (and much higher than the rate in most organisations) – is that although we are an organisation under stress, we are fundamentally in very good health.”

Jenny Davenport, from the independ-ent consultancy People in Business, which manages the questionnaire, agreed that it was “incredibly courageous” of the com-pany to go ahead with the survey in the middle of a major reorganisation and cost-cutting programme. “The majority of com-panies would not have the guts to carry out a survey in such circumstances so the decision to go ahead with it in itself is an expression that Guardian News & Media is living up to its values,” she said.

Brooks said one of the most important measures of the health of an organisation is whether staff would recommend GNM as an employer. He said: “This was down slightly on 2008, but in a year that has seen more than 100 redundancies…..74% of you said ‘yes’. This compares with a standard UK score of 68% in good times.” The pro-portion who would not recommend GNM as an employer doubled, but only to 10%.


Earlier in the year, the Guardian undertook its regular employee opinion survey and we noted that responses were encour-aging despite the signifi-cant changes underway. Nevertheless, the survey

identified a number of areas for improve-ment and in order to address these, there needs to be a clear process in place for departments to identify and implement actions.

The job losses have taken their toll on morale, exacerbated by restructuring. However, we believe that the Guard-ian has gone to considerable lengths to ensure the changes have been made with an overall sense of fairness. Examples of this are cutting staff at senior levels rather than just junior posts, and promising to offer enhanced redundancy if people are moved to another company through out-sourcing.

While it was positive to see the commer-cial side of the company hit its appraisal target, we noted poor progress on the editorial side and believe it is all the more important that effort is focussed on meet-ing this year’s more ambitious target. The approach to diversity has shown notable progress this year, including initiatives to widen inclusivity within editorial. It will be important to continually evaluate these programmes to ensure they are achieving the Guardian’s objectives and helping to broaden the readership and coverage of reported issues. However, this is the third diversity strategy in as many years. Both previous strategies have been abandoned before their success was measured, mak-ing it very difficult to find evidence of consistent improvement. This is a state of affairs we look forward to the new approach remedying.

Auditor’s report: People


GNM is determined to ensure that our operations reflect our editorial commitment to environmental protection and regeneration

The Guardian cannot with any great integrity point out the dangers of cli-mate change, waste, the over-use of resources and shrinking biodiver-sity unless we do as much as possible to limit our

impacts on the environment of our direct and indirect operations.

GNM has therefore been developing a broad strategy that encompasses not only our offices, print sites and business travel but also our indirect footprint, primarily through our use of paper and technology.

Given the overarching urgency to address climate change, GNM became one of the first companies in the world three years ago to set the ambitious long term aim of becoming carbon positive. In sup-port of this, from an operational perspec-tive, much of GNM’s focus in the past year has been on energy and carbon from our offices and print sites and our paper sup-ply chain.

But enormous efforts also continue to be made with respect to other envi-ronmental impacts. These range from the substantially reducing highly toxic and potentially harmful emissions from print sites by substituting solvent-based cleaning materials with water-based press cleaning alternatives; achieving ISO14001 certification for the print sites; maintain-ing high recycling and certification rates for our newsprint and magazine paper; and working to embed sustainability in purchasing.

Successes in the past year include a tracking system to understand the carbon intensity of our newsprint and magazine paper, Carbon Trust Standard certifica-tion for our Manchester print site and the launch of a new research project in partner-ship with the University of Bristol on the climate change impacts of technology.

While reducing our own carbon foot-print is important, we recognise that our greatest influence will continue to be the power of our content to change the behav-iour of individuals, organisations and gov-ernments.

The benefit of developing an integrated carbon positive strategy is that we can link together activities going on in different parts of the business. A perfect example of this synthesis has been the Guardian’s support for the highly successful 10:10 campaign to reduce the UK’s emissions

Towards carbon positive production

by 10% in 2010.Not only has the campaign led to tens

of thousands of individuals, businesses, councils, schools, colleges and universi-ties signing up, but it also spurred GNM to take several actions.

Most importantly, we made a commit-ment to reduce our own emissions by a tenth in this financial year. We also encour-aged building managment agents Broad-gate Estates to sign up our headquarters building, which we share with a number of other tenants.

The paper purchaser for our parent com-pany Guardian Media Group used its new carbon tracking system to switch some of our paper supplies to a low-carbon sup-plier in line with with GNM’s 10:10 com-mitment.

Our commercial departments also held a low-carbon breakfast, which included representatives from the 10:10 campaign, with our key advertising agency clients to encourage them to take action.

We also recognise the importance of employee engagement and in March, six months after the campaign launch, GNM published a staff newspaper covering 10:10 from an editorial, commercial and operational perspective and suggesting measures people could take at home and at work to reduce their own impacts. This was followed by lunchtime sessions giv-ing staff the chance to receive advice from organisations such as the Energy Savings Trust.

Becoming carbon positive is meant to act as a guiding star rather than constitut-ing a formal goal we expect to achieve in the next few years. We also recognise that it is dependent not only on us changing our own operational impacts but also on areas outside our control, such as economic con-ditions and changes in technology and regulation.

We asked the sustainable development charity Forum for the Future to review our progress on the carbon positive aspect of our vision this spring. Forum had originally worked with us to define the vision, and concluded that it was a difficult combina-tion to combine “very tangible ‘negative’ operational impacts with diffuse, intangi-ble ‘positive’ effect on readers, business and politics”.

It is also a tough challenge creating meaning for a new term such as “carbon positive” in a time of constant change. Without a definition, it is difficult to act

with forcefulness, but without action it is also difficult to define. Forum’s interviews with senior directors and other staff con-cluded that aspiring to be carbon positive is still seen as a good fit for the Guardian, and that core to it should be our editorial content. One director said: “Journalism is our most powerful tool, and should fall within our vision.”

At the same time, there was a consen-sus that the concept needs to be better understood by all staff in order to have more practical applications. One director said: “It has to become part of manage-ment responsibility, and be incorporated into performance indicators throughout the organisation.”

The GNM board has therefore commit-ted to setting clearer goals and targets in 2010 in order to bring the carbon positive vision a step closer.

One decision already taken has been to amend GNM’s sustainability vision because of the confusion arising from placing our commitment to investigate becoming carbon positive within the “operational” section. Given that our carbon positive vision involves change across the company, we have now moved this into the overall vision for all the com-pany’s activities.


GNM has been among the leaders in reducing its environmental impact as a company with new policies and new thinking

The carbon footprint of Guardian News & Media’s operations – including its London offices, two print sites, business travel and company car use – fell to 11,275 tonnes of CO2 in the financial year ending

March 2010, compared to 14,565 tonnes in 2008/9.

For the first time we have established a measure of carbon intensity as a better of indicator of how we are doing. Between 2008/09 and 2009/10, we have reduced by 11% the carbon intensity from 5.7 tonnes of CO2 per £100,000 of turnover to 5.1 tonnes.

Our parent company, Guardian Media Group, is also doing its bit to build our understanding of our carbon footprint by developing a system to measure carbon from the paper supply chain for the first time.

GNM’s print sites reduced CO2 gener-ated by electricity and gas use by 2,800 tonnes in the financial year. This was a result of lower newspaper sales and a fall in pagination, as well as a commitment to energy efficiency.

CO2 generated by energy use at GNM offices decreased slightly. While there were energy efficiency improvements at one office, this was balanced out by extra heating as a result of the cold winter. There was a 350 tonne CO2 decrease in travel related emissions.

“The key issue in our carbon footprint was very simply electricity,” says Claire Buckley, GMN’s environmental manager. “As we measure our carbon footprint at the moment, it’s more than 85% of our overall carbon emissions from our offices and our print centres.”

Our commitment to the 10:10 campaign helped us to focus on setting numerical targets, how we run our IT network and how we run the four buildings we occupy – our two London offices (as of May 2010 we are now only on one site) and print sites.

Over the last year, we have established quarterly reporting on our carbon footprint for all of GNM. Our print sites have been reporting their CO2 emissions per print copy on a monthly basis, and have made commitments to reducing this. Monthly reports from GMG on the carbon footprint of our paper supply now also feed into the GNM quarterly footprint.

Preparations have been made to estab-

Reducing our carbon footprint

lish the carbon emissions from our whole-sale distribution and retail networks. We have started to receive carbon data from our wholesale distributor, logistics pro-vider CEVA, and have initiated discussions with our retail distributors, to understand carbon emissions.

While GNM’s primary focus is to reduce its emissions, it also donates money and support to three organisations, each of which offers a different approach to car-bon reduction:

Eco Mission, a schools-based sustain-ability programme at our community part-ner school in Islington, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson.

Sandbag, which lobbies to ensure that fewer pollution permits are given to energy-intensive companies under the EU emissions trading scheme and buys and retires permits from the system, thereby pushing up their cost and reducing pollu-tion.

And The Converging World, which invests in large-scale renewable energy projects in India. All profits from its invest-ments provide funding for local sustain-able development work.


The last 12 months have seen a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions and an increase in recycling at Kings Place

Our carbon reduction plans for our office at Kings Place have focused on electricity. Greenhouse gas emis-sions dropped slightly, from 4869 tonnes of CO2e in 2008-2009 to

4816 tonnes in 2009-2010.“We had expected bigger energy sav-

ings,” says environmental manager Claire Buckley. “Although Kings Place, which we share with a number of other businesses and cultural organisations, had scored a B rating in energy efficiency, the building’s energy management system still required optimisation.”

GNM had been working with the build-ing management company and other ten-ants since it moved to Kings Place and supported the development of an envi-ronmental strategy agreement, which was signed collectively in April. This includes a commitment to improved energy moni-toring and management, and to the 10:10 campaign.

Plans include a smart metering system which, if successful, will provide us with live monitoring of our energy use. We aim to display this data on staff computers in a real time display. A smart meter will also be dedicated to monitoring GNM’s on-site data centre.

Just under half of all office waste in 2009-2010 was recycled or composted, compared with 34% in 2008-2009. Most of the rest of the waste was diverted to energy incinerators, with only 3% going to landfill.

The increase in recycling over the last year is mainly due to improvements in the waste management system, particu-larly as it applies to food waste. GNM has increased its target for office recycling to 66%, which will be dependent on staff being more careful not to contaminate the recycling bins with inappropriate waste.

“If we get too many non-recyclable items in a bin, it gets diverted to incinera-tion or landfill,” Buckley explained.”More work needs to be done to help GNM staff to identify which types of waste are non-recyclable.”

More news, less waste


GNM called in a consultancy firm to make good on its commitment to ethically sound procurement policies

Last year, we committed to reviewing and revising our central procurement pro-cedures to include sustain-ability criteria. An external consultant worked with the procurement team at GNM in summer 2009, which

included three in-depth case studies.The consulting company, Corporate

Property Advisers, concluded: “The pro-curement team were strongly motivated by the Living our Values document. This also applied to those who feature in the case studies. This is not always the case of visionary or strategic documents, so whatever processes have been followed to embed Lliving our Values in the organisa-tion, they are certainly paying off.

“The culture of GNM is strongly geared towards behaviour that tries to minimise impacts on the environment, have a posi-tive impact on society and within commu-nities, and achieve best value for money. Again, this is refreshing as most people experience a situation where they make an effort to be sustainable at home but don’t get the opportunity to do the same at work.

“GNM’s procurement team does, how-ever, have their work cut out for them. They are a relatively new team, making attempts to centralise a heavily decen-tralised procurement process. With this in mind, there’s a lot of old behaviour which needs to be challenged. In particu-lar, the senior management pressure to go for the lowest up-front cost option. This often means that the benefits gained by considering whole life costs aren’t fully realised.

“The fact that the team feels empow-ered in this way is a testament to GNM’s inspiring and common sense approach to sustainability issues.”

As a result of this work, the procure-ment team did an analysis in spring 2010 to identify priorities, including sustain-ability issues and a project plan has been developed for 2010-2011.

Sustainable paper sourcing was also high on our agenda in the past year, with the achievement of sustainable timber (PEFC) certification for Guardian Saturday magazine and the Observer magazine.

Sustainable sourcing is a must for these uncertain times


How innovations and modifications will mean as a company we reduce our carbon output

GNM’s London and Man-chester print sites came together under one man-agement team in 2008. Since then, they have worked on a common approach to environ-mental improvement.

Guardian Print Centre (GPC) London was certified to the international standard ISO 14001 in 2008. This award is given to organisations that show they understand their adverse impacts on the environment and work to improve them.

GPC Manchester expects to achieve ISO 14001 in the summer of 2010. GPC Man-chester was also awarded the Carbon Trust Standard (CTS) in 2009. This is given to organisations that prove that they meas-ure, manage and reduce their carbon foot-print. The CTS assessment showed that, over the last three years, GPC reduced its CO2 emissions by 22% from 5,700 tonnes to 4,660 tonnes and by almost 5% relative to turnover.

GNM’s aim is to achieve Carbon Trust Standard certification for GPC London and for the company as a whole by the end of 2010.

In our last sustainability report, we promised to establish and implement print site carbon reductions, with a focus on energy and waste. They currently account for nearly half of all our emissions.

GPC London averaged 17g of CO2 per copy, against a maximum target of 20g per copy in 2009, whilst GPC Manchester achieved an average of 22g CO2 per copy against a target 25g CO2 per copy. The Lon-don print site has set itself a 2010 target of 12g a copy and Manchester 20g per copy. Carbon savings will come from measures such as running presses on demand, more efficient equipment, lighting, heating and ventilation systems.

Some of the chemicals used in print-ing contain volatile organic compounds (VOCs). These are mainly used for cleaning the printing presses. If not stored and used properly, they can have negative environ-mental and health impacts. But following a successful trial in London, from April 2010 both print sites will use non-VOC solvents for cleaning the presses.

GPC Manchester has also achieved a 33% water saving, simply by adding flush sensors to the site’s urinals, which used to flush constantly and now only activate after use. New waste services have been

Improvements to printing sites will mean less emissions

contracted at GPC London to drive up recycling rates and improve waste moni-toring at the plant and similar plans are underway to change waste firms at GPC Manchester.


With a huge global online audience, it’s never been so important to ensure information and sustainability aren’t exclusive

While we have done a lot of work on under-standing and reducing the footprint of our print products and operations,

we have a much shallower knowledge of the impact of the technology we use to deliver our content and our digital and online products.

Only a few studies have so far been undertaken and they indicate that the impact of both paper and online commu-nications largely depends on user behav-iour.

For example, the BBC has just com-pleted some research which shows that 80% of the carbon footprint from their programming is down to its audience.

With more than 1.5bn people online around the world, scientists estimate that the amount of energy used by the internet is growing by more than 10% each year.

GNM has already started to treat this issue more seriously. When we moved to our new offices, the IT department made great efficiencies in data centre electricity use by virtualising its servers, ie reducing the number of physical machines storing the data, and estimated a CO2 saving of about 800 tonnes. This year, it will focus on reducing electricity use by the desktop computers, such as managing software updates more efficiently. Currently the updates require our computers to stay on overnight.

We worked out that electricity use by desktop computers and our servers at our main offices was about 1,200 tonnes of CO2, almost 30% of the total generated by office energy use. In the grander scale of things this is a relatively small impact, but this is the area we can do the most about, and reduction plans are under develop-ment for this year.

Estimated IT CO2 emissions over the last yearThe wider carbon impacts of our digital products and services, especially of guard-ian.co.uk, still need to be addressed. We have started an ambitious new project with the University of Bristol on the “cli-mate change impact of technology to deliver media content”, such as digital applications [apps] and digital printing ... In June 2010, we organised a “technol-

Understanding our technology is key to making it more efficient

ogy and climate change roundtable” for internal and external stakeholders, which provided a thought-provoking debate and steer on what we should be addressing, from user behaviour, to the energy use of increasing data volumes and cloud com-puting. We have moved on from a “print v online” debate to a realisation that the best we can do is to reduce the impact of both.

GNM has been investigating using IT outsourcing to provide some of its tech-nology services. The procurement process has included conditions that any external supplier chosen will be able to monitor IT energy use and put an energy saving pro-gramme in place; environmental impacts, from energy to waste electronics, and work to agreed objectives.

We continue to donate our redundant IT equipment to Digital Links, a charity that recycles and refurbishes computer hardware to provide affordable access to technology to people in the world’s poor-est regions.


Despite a fall in newspaper sales, GNM’s demand for paper remains one of the key contributors to the company’s carbon footprint

A progressive decline in sales of the Guardian and Observer newspa-paers, combined with the need to cut costs through lower pagina-tion and paper weight, means that the amount

of paper used by GNM fell by nearly a third in the financial year ending March 2010.

The cost of paper is the second largest fixed cost to the business after staff.

Exacerbating the fall in sales was the board’s decision to reduce the number of copies being printed in Europe as well as ending the practice of give-away bulk copies.

The May 2010 ABC represents the tenth full month without bulk sales in both GNM titles. It means that there are 13,000 less Guardian and 21,000 less Observer bulk sales versus May 2009. The reduction of sales in Europe equates to a combined 32,000 drop in sales for the Guardian and The Observer.

Despite the fall in paper use, it will con-tinue to figure for some time as one of the key contributors towards our overall car-bon footprint.

Our parent company, Guardian Media Group, which buys newsprint and maga-zine grade paper on behalf of GNM and all its other businesses, has been taking the issue of sustainability seriously for a number of years. It revised its paper pur-chasing policy this year, committing the company to:

• Continually improve the quality of infor-mation held about paper supply chains and respond to the information we receive• Put in place procedures to ensure, as far as possible, that fibre is not derived from illegal sources or from uncertified forests in areas of high conservation value• Increase the proportion, where possi-ble, of paper that is recycled and/or comes from credibly certified, well managed for-ests – this will currently include certifica-tion under any of the following schemes: FSC, PEFC, SFI, CSA, UKWAS, although we will review this list annually• Increase the proportion, where possible, of paper that we buy that includes third party certification of the Chain of Custody from the forest to delivery to GMG• Seek opportunities to highlight and share best practice with industry peers and to improve sector standards on paper

From forest to factory, a revised paper purchasing policy

sustainability• Better quantify the energy consumption and associated emissions of greenhouse gases associated with paper supply, given that it is such a large part of our overall car-bon footprint• Put in place procedures to ensure, as far as possible, that all paper manufactur-ing operations comply with relevant local and national legislation, and continually increase the proportion derived from operations that have third party certified environmental management systems that include programmes to reduce emissions of AOX, SOx, NOx, BOD, COD, solid waste and hazardous waste• Avoid paper that has been bleached using technologies other than Totally Chlorine Free or Elemental Chlorine Free• Put in place procedures to ensure, as far as possible, that all print operations comply with relevant local and national legislation, and continually increase the proportion derived from operations that have third party certified environmental management systems that include pro-grammes to reduce emissions of VOCs, COD, heavy metals, solid waste and haz-ardous waste

To implement this policy, GMG is set-ting challenging but realistic annual tar-gets as well as asking suppliers to provide relevant management and performance information:

Recycled contentGMG has a commitment to keep recycled levels for newsprint at not less than 80% of total tonnes of fibre purchased.

In the last financial year, the recycled content of the Guardian and Observer newsprint was 97%. The overall figure for GMG fell slightly below target at 78%, although it is expected to rise again in 2010. The 80% figure is based on the fact that fibre loss in recycled paper manufac-ture requires an annual input of around 20% virgin fibre to be sustainable.

Certified virgin fibre contentGMG made a bold target of progressively increasing the certified virgin fibre con-tent of its newsprint and magazine paper combined to 90% by 2012. It had already achieved a rate of 81% in the year end-ing March 2010. The company also said it would demonstrate full chain-of-custody certification for the virgin fibre content of the Guardian Weekend magazine and the

Observer magazine by the end of March 2011. This target had already been met by the summer of 2010.

Carbon dataGMG became a market leader in 2009 by deciding to embed carbon intensity into its paper decision-making process.

A Carbon Trust report for Trinity Mir-ror in 2006 had pointed out that “energy source, rather than energy use, in paper manufacturing is the main driver of carbon emissions. Using a lower emission energy source has a greater impact on carbon emissions than increasing the recycled fibre content.”

To give us the relevant information, GMG created a database of electricity and fossil fuel energy used to manufacture each tonne of paper product supplied, and the associated greenhouse gas emis-sions.

Data shows that at the end the 2009-2010 financial year, the average green-house gas emissions were 411 kgs of CO2 per tonne of newsprint, and there is a commitment to reduce this by a tenth in the current financial year, in line with the 10:10 campaign commitment.

As a result of the analysis, Steve Gould, GMG’s paper-purchasing manager, made the decision to drop one of our UK recycled paper suppliers in favour of a Norwegian company. The Norwegian firm produces 9.45 kgs of CO2 per tonne of paper, while our UK supplier produced more than 100 times that amount at 976 kgs.

The Norwegian mill’s fibre source is 56% recycled fibre and 44% certified virgin, compared to the UK mill’s 100% recycled content.

The vast majority of the difference in the CO2 emissions is due to the Norwegian company’s use of hydroelectricity, while UK paper manufacturers use the national grid, which is largely powered by fossil fuels.

The paper from Norway will travel further, but GMG calculated the carbon impacts of transporting the paper would be much lower than the emissions saved from its production.

Environmental management sys-temsGMG will continue to ensure that at least 95% of the mills that supply paper to GMG are certified to the ISO 14001 environmen-tal management system standard.


Working with forestry and paper experts is essential for any responsible and progressive newspaper

GNM recognises that it cannot solve the prob-lems of its supply chain on its own but must work with others in the publishing and paper industries.

To develop our think-ing, we took part in a roundtable with the paper industry in 2010 to discuss the scope for collaboration. “People assume printing is bad because you’re cutting down trees … but the paper industry has done a lot on sustainability,” says Claire Buckley, the environment manager at GNM.

The meeting was developed in partner-ship with Two Tomorrows, GNM’s sus-tainability auditors, and members of Two Sides, an initiative led by forestry, paper production and printing companies aim-ing towards sustainability.

Beyond this, GNM held a technology roundtable as part of its sustainability week activities in summer 2010.

Parent company Guardian Media Group has also made a commitment to start shar-ing best practice with others in the news-paper industry.

Restricting the paper trail


It is a credit to the organisation that, despite the personnel changes and disruption associated with the present commercial climate, impetus to achieve environmental improvements in operations has been maintained. Environmen-tal management across the print

sites is now better co-ordinated and real improvements have been made, espe-cially in reducing energy consumption. Improvements in office waste manage-ment have also been demonstrated, with a substantial reduction in the amount of waste going to landfill.

The database of environmental infor-mation about purchased paper is proving to be an excellent management tool for tracking and improving the environmen-tal characteristics of paper supply. We also noted the efforts being made to embed sustainability in other areas of the supply chain.

The Guardian has an ambitious vision of becoming carbon positive. While some work has been done in the past year to define this goal and to further map carbon impacts, much remains to be done to trans-late this vision into clearly defined actions. For example, in spite of the preliminary work done this year on the impacts of digital operations, the Guardian, in com-mon with many media organisations, still under-reports carbon impacts from dig-ital publishing. Other key pieces from the carbon footprint jigsaw, notably product distribution, are also still missing. Turn-ing the carbon positive vision into force-ful operational actions is an area where the Guardian could show real leadership during the coming year.

The clarity and comparability of per-formance information would be enhanced through the use of graphs or summary tables that include systematic compari-sons with prior years and benchmarks.

Auditor’s report: Operations


GNM staff have shown their commitment to our neighbours by volunteering in greater numbers despite the recession

Despite a challenging eco-nomic environment, the Guardian has bucked a national trend that has seen a fall in charitable giving and the propor-tion of employees that are volunteering.

While Guardian News & Media has gone through a major restructuring and hun-dreds of redundancies, a third of employ-ees still participate in payroll giving, down only 1% from last year and way above the national average.

In the financial year ending March 2010, the percentage of staff who volunteered has risen to just over a fifth, compared with 10% the previous year, largely as a result of our near 300-strong advertising depart-ment taking part in a range of community initiatives over a one-week period.

Volunteering is supported by a company policy that entitles staff to two work days a year to get involved in charitable projects, subject to line manager’s approval.

GNM’s managing director, Tim Brooks, believes the community programme becomes even more important during difficult economic times because it serves as a reminder that there are people facing far worse problems. He has stated that he would like to see every member of staff take at least one of their entitled days off to volunteer over the next year.

He has been an active champion, attending events and becoming involved with several of our community partners, including helping local young people fill skips with earth and worms to start the “skip garden” project and helping stu-dents at Elizabeth Garrett Anderson with career preparation.

The latest staff survey, held in the Autumn of 2009, showed that 83% believe the Guardian is committed to supporting our local and global communities. Over the next year, effort needs to be made to communicate the value of the scheme in contributing to the business and to fur-ther increase the number of regular vol-unteers. Heads of department have been asked to make a commitment to commu-nicate opportunities to their teams and encourage volunteering. Knowledge and support for our community projects has been helped by an employee engagement programme that has seen community partners set up stall inside the Guardian offices during sustainability events in

Our place in the community and how our employees are helping

2009 and 2010.The recession has led to a cut in the

community budget but this has been more than offset by a significant increase not only in staff volunteering but also in the donation of materials and services and using our brand reputation to attract additional support and funding from other businesses and organisations.

A key initiative launched last year with the specific aim of increasing staff under-standing and engagement with sustaina-bility was the practical sustainability train-ing for new starters with Global Generation – the feedback from staff who participated and the local community they worked with has been overwhelmingly positive and we will continue and expand this programme. You can read about developments in this project over the last year here.

The last year has mainly focused on developing the new partnerships that were established with our move to King’s Cross in December 2008, as well as continuing to effectively work with organisations we have a much longer association with.

One highlight has been our success at linking our community partners with some of our other business activities. For example, we partnered both Global Giving and one of our carbon reduction partners The Converging World (TCW) with the Guardian travel awards.

Working with Global Giving enabled those attending the awards to raise more than £3,000 for two grassroots develop-ment charities in Thailand, where the awards were held. A donation in acknowl-edgment for the carbon impacts of the awards was made to TCW’s renewable energy and development programme in south India .

Guardian Business and Professional, the business-to-business department, donated £800 each to our three carbon reduction partners , in acknowledgment of the impact of its events during the finan-cial year. We are now looking at ways to expand on this involvement over the com-ing year.

An interesting development over the last year has been sharing our learning and approach to community and staff engage-ment with several other organisations, including our parent company, Guardian Media Group, other media companies such as BSkyB and clients, including travel company Tui and Eurostar.

Working closely with BITC on research

they have designed and conducted into the business benefits of staff volunteer-ing helped develop our own thinking around better integrating staff community involvement into the business.

This links closely to the aims for the community and staff engagement pro-gramme over the coming year. One of which is to further increase the integra-tion of the community programme into the business.

For example, the ad department’s employee engagement programme in 2009 will be replicated this year with staff in Guardian Business and Profes-sional. Staff at our print site in Stratford, London, will also have the opportunity to get involved with the rolling out of our successful partnership with C-Change to deliver Eco Mission, a school programme that aims to educate and equip students to make their school and their local com-munity more sustainable.

The project, which was launched at our partner school Elizabeth Garrett Ander-son, will now be delivered in Stratford’s Eastlea school. Print site staff will be able to share their experience and knowledge of carbon reduction with the young people at the school.

We will continue to support Eco Mission at EGA as they build on their success this year, achieving both bronze and silver eco-schools flags and go for green.

Integration of the community pro-gramme will be helped by working more closely with departments to meet their needs through working with the commu-nity. For example through teambuilding days, which this year have seen the HR department spend four half days volun-teering with Age Concern Camden.

Another key objective towards fur-ther integration is including community involvement within the staff appraisals process so that skills gained through volun-teering are officially recognised. Given the expansion of our community programme over the last 18 months, we recognise the need to improve the process for monitor-ing and evaluating the programme, both its internal impact and the contribution it is making to our local communities. A key priority is developing a comprehensive measurement and evaluation system and conducting an impact assessment both internally and with the communities we work with.

Highlights from some of our commu-


nity partnersWe have focused on providing an update

on four of our partnerships in this report Pentonville prison, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson secondary school, Live maga-zine and our own “Newsroom” education centre.

Details of all of our partnerships [http://www.guardian.co.uk/sustainability/local-partnerships] and the full criteria can be read here.

The skip garden project, created together by local young people and staff from local businesses a year ago has not only grown a full range of organic produce, but is proving to be a fertile environment for growing people .

Over 250 children and young people have visited and worked in the skip garden and over 35 GNM staff have participated in practical sustainability training days. The changing landscape of the Kings Cross development site, filled with the sound of trains, and a skyline punctuated by con-struction cranes is proving to be a helpful setting for conversations about climate change and the very real business of grow-ing a new and sustainable future.

Considering what will be built over the next 10 years, this has been a potent starting place to begin discussions about growing a new kind of community: who will live and work in those buildings? What kind of values do we need to have to build a better “we”.

The latest news is the opening of a sec-ond portable food production garden, the hoop garden, in reference to the poly tun-nel hoops which allow greater food pro-duction on the site and will contribute to realising the social enterprise aspect of the project. This is being developed through a workshop process with local young peo-ple, supported by staff from the Guard-ian, BAM and Carrillion apprentices. With the site and infrastructure support again generously supported by King’s Cross Central.


The Guardian’s partnership with the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson school in north London helps prepare students to act as advocates of sustainability

The word inclusive could have been coined to describe Elizabeth Garrett Anderson school (EGA). The multi-faith school in Islington, north London has a roll of 900 girls aged 11-16 who between them

muster 62 different languages. Labelled “outstanding” in its last Ofsted report, the school draws pupils from a wide catchment area and new arrivals will often include children in care and those seeking asylum.

The collaboration between EGA and the Guardian began nine years ago with a mentoring programme between pupils and Guardian staff. It has now developed into a full-blown partnership.

In 2008, the Guardian facilitated the launch of Eco-Mission, a project aimed at creating a sustainability and climate change programme which was rolled out in February 2009. Eco-Mission is led by a student action team, whose members have devised and implemented a series of workshops and projects. These include food and biodiversity, a home energy audit, a kitchen waste project, a “power down” campaign and a cultural food gar-den. The latter aims at providing high quality fruit and vegetables for sale to the school kitchens. Profits are ploughed back into the project.

EGA’s assistant headteacher, Teresa Owusubonsu, says the project has brought the school together, with students and staff gaining a better understanding of the need to cut down on their carbon use: “The students feel empowered, realising they can effect change and influence those around them; at school and in their homes and communities.”

The Eco-Mission project has been rec-ognised by the Sustainable Schools Frame-work, set up in 2006, by the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) to “guide schools on their sustainable jour-ney”. Last year, EGA won bronze and sil-ver awards in the Eco-Schools programme, which links 40,000 schools in 46 coun-tries. The Eco-Mission action team now have the coveted DCSF Green Flag award in their sights.

The school has also received high-level political recognition. Last year, it was chosen to host a visit by Michelle Obama. During the visit, a year 11 student gave a presentation on student participation in

Empowering students to effect change

school decision-making which referred to the school’s environment programmes.

EGA’s headteacher, Jo Dibb, said the partnership with the Guardian brings great benefits to the school: “Students gain a wealth of expertise and experience from working with their staff, something that just cannot be replicated in school. For teachers, the association with such a respected institution with clear values provides a boost to the school’s morale and a sense of working towards a com-mon goal.”


The thriving GNM Education Centre provides much lauded journalism workshops for nine to 18-year-olds

GNM’s Education Cen-tre, which is sited at our Kings Place headquar-ters, continues to thrive. Between April 2009 and March 2010, some 7,631 visitors passed through it’s doors and integra-

tion of the centre into the main Guardian offices has seen a marked increase in the number of editorial staff engaging in the workshops.

GNM’s editor-in-chief, Alan Rusbridger, said: “The Education Centre provides an authentic newsroom experience for chil-dren aged nine to 18. It introduces them to the rigours of news gathering and allows them to understand the editing, writing and photojournalism on the Guardian’s production systems. It inspires young peo-ple and connects the Guardian to readers of the future, and represents to our staff a long term commitment to journalism and training.”

The school workshops are heavily over-subscribed and to meet demand, the centre runs after-school sessions and occasion-ally opens on Saturdays. The Q&Asessions with journalists for university students are extremely popular, as are the conferences, seminars, in-service training for teachers and adult workshops. The centre wel-comes groups and individuals with special needs and teaching areas are accessible to wheelchair users and those with mobility issues.

Last November, the centre was awarded the Learning Outside the Classroom Qual-ity Badge, designed to enable teachers to identify providers of quality educational visits.

New workshops include:“Katine - it starts with a village” gives

students the opportunity to report on the Guardian’s four year project to supporting development work in a rural community in Uganda. Students also work on video editing, creating a film using rushes from the project.

A series of day workshops allow stu-dents to create their own front page based on environmental issues.

The last words are taken from the cen-tre’s message board, deluged by expres-sions of gratitude and goodwill from visi-tors. “Outstanding. Wonderful day! I’ve organised 15 school trips in the last year and this was by far the best in terms of learning and student engagement.”

‘An authentic newsroom experience for children’


Guardian and Observer volunteers have been mentoring on journalism and design at the Brixton-based youth magazine Live since 2004

GNM has worked for a number of years with Live magazine, a pub-lication written, illus-trated, produced and distributed by young people in south Lon-don. The magazine

aims to communicate positive messages and information by young people to their peers.

All Live’s contributors are aged 21 or under and they retain strict editorial independence. Many of the writers have emerged from troubled backgrounds and are as likely to have been sent by pupil referral units, as much as by teachers who have spotted potential journalists in their classes.

Guardian and Observer staff have been supporting Live’s young people since 2004 through journalism and design mentor-ing.

Live’s publisher Sam Conniff says it is reassuring “that the young people are receiving specialist guidance from the Guardian on particularly sensitive story issues, ranging from teenage gang rape, to honour killings, to BNP youth recruitment. Live is uniquely placed to help a really broad group of young people, prompting discussion on issues that might never oth-erwise come up amongst peer groups in day-to-day life. The Guardian team fully support us in that goal”.

Live has publications in south and east London, making a combined circulation of 35,000. Last summer, the Live editorial team came to the Guardian’s headquarters in King’s Cross to produce the pilot issue of Live North. Editorial staff worked closely with the magazine’s young journalists to provide support, advice and mentoring.

The finished product, with a print run of 10,000, is impressive. Alongside features you would expect from a magazine aimed at teenagers, such as fashion and music, sit gritty pieces covering knife crime and gang rape. The environment is not ignored, with a colourful piece about teenagers growing vegetables in skips in the King’s Cross area, a project that was developed by the Guardian.

Mahta Hassanzadeh, a peer mentor on the Live North project said: “Getting a bunch of teenagers in the Guardian offices for three weeks of their summer holiday and asking them to learn, write and design may seem like quite the request. But give

Live action

them a blank canvas – in the shape of a mini-magazine – and creative control, and it won’t take long for the ideas to start unfolding. This is exactly what Live maga-zine is about, engaging Londoners between the ages of 13-21 to create something that’s fun, interesting and inspirational. To cre-ate something that is theirs.

“Two and a half years ago, I was 18 and starting out as the editor of Live at our Brixton offices and it was so pleasing to see a new group of teenagers start another chapter of Live’s history and to spread the aim of encouraging young people to voice their opinions and ideas and see what they can create when given the chance and time. More than worthwhile stuff.”


Our partnership with Pentonville prison has led to the opening of a media suite, a major revamp of the jail’s newspaper and opportunities for prisoners to connect with Guardian staff

The editorial conference aimed at planning the World Cup edition was cancelled. The prison was on lock down due to a security alert and the editorial team were holed up, alongside the

other 1,100 residents. Setbacks of this nature are part and parcel of publishing a newspaper produced by prisoners, in this case at Pentonville prison, north London. Security is the biggest threat to deadlines, with sudden transfers of key personnel, running second.

The Guardian, which has been support-ing the development of the prisoners’ newspaper Voice of the Ville for the past year, developed its link with Pentonville in 2006 when executives spent a year men-toring the senior management team at the prison. When the paper moved to its new headquarters in King’s Cross in December 2008, it approached the governor to see how the two organisations could work together.

Before the Guardian’s involvement, Voice of the Ville was laid out in black and white on two sides of A4. Now it runs to 16 pages, with full colour front and back pages and spot colour throughout. The improved product comes courtesy of IT equipment donated by GNM to furnish the institution’s new media suite.

GNM also supports the prison’s accred-ited BTEC programmes, including the National Union of Journalist course.

It is not just equipment that has found its way from the Guardian to Pentonville. Writers and support staff from across the paper make regular visits. They sit in at conferences, exchange ideas, suggest layouts and, in the words of Jenny Tho-mas, “give prisoners real life experience of desktop publishing on professional equip-ment”.

Thomas, who lectures in English at the jail - and has been involved in the partner-ship from the start - speaks highly of the benefits brought by visits from the Guard-ian. She says that meeting staff from the paper has “widened the horizons” of the participating prisoners and “shown them there is something better”. She says visi-tors from the paper “treat prisoners as equals and listen to them” in a practical interaction raises their self-esteem.

Inmate Carl says writing for the Voice rekindled his love of learning: “With

Inside story

the support of teachers and visits from Guardian staff, prisoners now have the facilities to undertake journalism courses and develop their writing. The continued help of the Guardian will help sustain this opportunity for prisoners to have a means of expression.”

The partnership is far from being a one-way street. Pentonville is a “local” prison (taking prisoners from local courts) and its iconic buildings are highly visible to the many thousands who pass it everyday. But for all they know of life on the inside, it might as well be in Timbuktu.

This link has given Guardian staff a unique opportunity to get behind the high security walls and many say the visits have changed their perception of prisoners and prison life.

All but a tiny minority of the 85,000 plus prisoners in England and Wales, will be released back into society. How we treat them while they are incarcerated will have a huge bearing on how they treat us when they are released. By encouraging our pris-oner partners to express themselves, this unique partnership between GNM and one of the oldest jails in the country is playing a small part in showing prisoners there may indeed be “something better”.

A former inmate writes ...Carl Oakley was working on Penton-

ville’s Voice of the Ville and spent a day with Observer Magazine staff on his release. He writes about his experience below:

A short time ago I was dreaming about walking out of those big, foreboding metal gates that had denied me my freedom, I was enclosed by bricks and mortar. Now I am sitting in an open plan office, in a building full of natural light, surrounded by renowned journalists. I have encoun-tered problems in my life, most of my own making. I suffered the consequences of the naivety of my youth. Fortunately I became a beneficiary of the community partner-ship between HMP Pentonville and the Guardian and the Observer and this has aided me in my determination to achieve something of substance with my life.

I was one of the many “resident” writers to previously contribute to the award-win-ning Voice of the Ville. A prison is a micro-cosm of the society in which it is set. Brit-ain’s inability to engage the disadvantaged and deprived in their local environment and provide real opportunities to empower oneself to overcome potential obstacles

is clearly visible in the penal system. It is a sad indictment when most attempts to reduce re-offending and the causes of crime do not extend beyond tokenism. Though removed from society, all but the most serious criminals will eventually have to be resettled into the environment from which they were removed. It is logi-cal that the public should have some form of access to the penal institutions to make sure that they are not the Butlins holiday camps reported about in some red-tops. Often the most vulnerable and neglected are conveniently caught up in the criminal justice system. There should be a balance between punishment and rehabilitation.

The sustainability scheme and such initiatives enable offenders to draw upon the numerous resources that could make a difference in the lives of offenders and the wider public. The Voice of the Ville helped me to rekindle my love of learning, debate and the exchange of ideas. With the sup-port of teachers at HMP Pentonville and the workshops and visits from employees of the Guardian group I have taken strides forward and shall be commencing a degree course in the new academic year. Prison-ers now have the facilities to undertake journalism courses and develop their writing. The credit crunch will inevitably have an impact upon the budget the Jus-tice Ministry will have at its disposal and this in turn affect the variety of education courses available. The continued help of the Guardian will help sustain the signifi-cant efforts in launching and maintaining the chance for prisoners to have a means of expression.

Upon my release, I was offered the opportunity to gain some work experi-ence at the Guardian and the Observer. A week ago I was being released from cus-tody. Today I am inhabiting a completely different world, but one in which I do not feel as if I could not exist and thrive. Any feelings of trepidation were allayed by the warm reception I received and I would like to thank those that have been giving with their time.


We noted the i n c r e a s e i n participation in volunteer-ing this year. The Guardian supports a l l employees to

undertake up to two working days each year of voluntary work with one of the eight community partners. This year the Commercial department strongly pro-moted that all staff participated in some volunteering. As well as benefits to the community partners, individuals ben-efited personally from participating and feedback was positive.

We are pleased to see the Guardian developing its monitoring and evaluation of community programmes in particular to quantify the impacts and benefits arising from its investments – both financial and volunteering time.

Auditor’s report: Community


There has been positive progress, as well as setbacks in GNM’s quest to be a leader in sustainability within the media industry

The last year has seen some great strides forward, as well as some setbacks in the sustainability govern-ance structure at Guard-ian News & Media.

On the positive side, the board has re-iterated that living our values is one of the core objectives of the company.

The directors have also agreed that our independent auditors Two Tomorrows will review progress on our targets at six-monthly intervals, rather than just annu-ally. Another major step forward has been the approval of a sustainability vision and strategy by our parent company Guardian Media Group.

There has traditionally been a level of disquiet at GNM, that while it was seek-ing to be a leader in sustainability within the media industry, it could not truly achieve that aim if the rest of the group’s businesses did not also have clear public goals. While there were centres of excel-lence within other parts of GMG, the board did not have an integrated approach or a way of measuring progress.

The GMG vision, branded as the Power of 10, commits the group to 10 areas of change, ranging from environmental management and ethical procurement to employee and community engagement.

To ensure progress is properly moni-tored, GMG has a sustainability champion on the board and a regular reporting proc-ess. Each business within the group is also required to have a sustainability govern-ance system in place.

One of the biggest setbacks within GNM’s own governance structure has been delays in the agreed setting of board objectives around social, environmental and economic impacts, caused in part by the restructuring within the company. An agreement had been reached in 2008, in which each director would have personal objectives based on achieving the com-pany’s sustainability strategy. However, its introduction was initially delayed, and then got caught up in the company restructuring programme, which has seen the number of directors reduced from 16 to 10, and responsibilities shift within the business.

With the new board in place, each direc-tor now does have at least one sustaina-bility objective for the year ending March

Sustainability report: governance

2011 and this is linked to their bonus.The implementation of the com-

pany sustainability strategy was further impeded by changes within the sustain-able development team at GNM. The loss of sustainability advocates within some departments as a result of the company’s redundancy programme. As a result, an independent consultancy was asked to look at the governance structure of sus-tainability and their recommendations were implemented in June 2010.

The new system sees the operations director Derek Gannon continue in his role as board sustainability champion. He chairs a monthly meeting of the sustain-ability leadership group, which consists of all the commercial directors as well as Jo Confino, executive editor (sustainability and external engagement), who repre-sents the editorial departments.

Sustainability strategy implementation now comes under the umbrella of Paula Tsung, whose role is head of workplace and sustainability. There are two full-time specialist roles within the sustain-able development team; a sustainability manager and an environmental manager. They will be supported by three internal consultants, one representing editorial and the other two from the main commer-cial business-to-consumer and business-to-business departments.

The organisation of advocates, or cham-pions, is also being refreshed. Their role was made difficult, not only because some directors had not set their own objectives, but also because they had no official job description and were in some cases expected to perform their role unofficially on top of their normal day jobs. Of course, any effective governance system relies on an understanding of what sustainability means for the company in all its various departments.

A weakness was noted in the 2008 employee survey, which showed that a fairly large proportion of staff did not have an in-depth understanding of our sustain-ability vision or how to integrate it into their daily working lives.

To rectify this, the sustainable develop-ment team organised presentations to all commercial and operational departments during 2009, as well as sustainability events for all staff. Plans to take the road-show to the main editorial heads of depart-ment meeting were delayed because there were more pressing agenda items.

This staff engagement programme has had a marked impact, with the 2009 employee survey showing a dramatic uplift in the scores on sustainability. One of the lowest scores in the entire 2008 sur-vey had been the response to the question of whether the Guardian “encourages me to take an active part in reducing my envi-ronmental impact at work”.

The latest survey, released in November 2009, shows that the response to this ques-tion scored the biggest improvement, with 65% of staff now believing the Guardian does encourage them. Furthermore, the report shows that 86% of staff are aware of the company’s sustainability vision, one of the highest scores in the survey, 72% believe it has effective environmen-tal practices in place and that 83% believe the Guardian is committed to supporting our local and global communities through providing volunteering, resources and funding.

GNM managing director Tim Brooks highlighted these improvements in a blog to staff: “Last time you told us you weren’t really sure what our policies and vision were, and you weren’t sure how to contribute and participate. These scores are now high – in some areas, really very high.”


Two Tomorrows describes its work in evaluating the Guardian’s performance in the Living our Values study

How we assureIn some senses our job is similar to that of a journalist; investigating and holding the Guardian to account for its actions and words. For sustainability reporting, this role is often referred to as assurance – and our role is to provide extra assurance to the Guardian and its stakeholders.

The Guardian has responsibility for the preparation of the report and we are not involved in its preparation. We under-take our work using a set of guidelines and requirements known as the AA1000 assurance standard. This lays out com-monly agreed expectations of us and of the Guardian.

The core expectation of the Guardian is three principles that we check against:

• Inclusivity: engaging with stakeholders and involving them meaningfully in the Guardian’s sustainability approach• Materiality: identifying the most impor-tant issues to the Guardian and its stake-holders• Responsiveness: taking action on the most important issues and communicat-ing those actions.

In essence, this means checking that the right issues are covered in the report. We also check that the information in the report is right – so we analyse the data and the claims made about achievements and performance.

If the Guardian says – “we are the world leader” – we want to see evidence to sup-port this. We could spend our entire time checking absolutely everything and very thoroughly. In reality this would take a huge amount of resources, so we use the AA1000 standard to guide us on how much checking to do.

Our work was designed to achieve a “moderate” level of assurance against the principles and performance information (mainly data) which is known as “type 2” assurance.

A moderate level means we don’t check everything, we take a sampling approach, focusing on the most important issues and using our professional judgment to decide where to focus our efforts.

This year, we checked a range of claims and data throughout the report. This involved interviews with staff at all levels of the organisation, including board direc-tors and employees at Kings Place and the two print sites in London and Manches-

The auditors explain their role

ter. We independently researched what issues might be important to the Guard-ian and its stakeholders. We reviewed the report, and, identifying the claims and data reported, conducted interviews to review evidence to support these. We did not review the preparation of financial information reported.

Pages within our assurance scope are indicated by the “Assured by Two Tomor-rows” logo. In addition, we may comment on individual pages posted to the sustain-ability website during the year. Where data and claims within these articles have been checked they include our logo.

Our team included Jason Perks, Mark Line, Judith Murphy, Dick Dalley and Elvin Ozensoy, selected to provide the breadth and depth of expertise needed to cover the issues. It is important that we are independent.

We have also advised the Guardian in the past on its approach to responsible paper sourcing . This role moved to one of assuring the sourcing data last year – which we view as fully compatible with our overall assurance role. This year, we undertook assurance of the outsourcing of the IT department to assess whether the process was aligned with the Scott Trust values. We confirm that we have no other work with the Guardian and have no relationships with significant stakehold-ers that might compromise our independ-ence. We also follow our code of conduct for assurance. Details of our team’s experi-ence can be viewed on our website.

Our conclusion and observations using AA1000ASBased on the work we did, we have not found any evidence to suggest that the report does not properly describe the Guardian’s adherence to the principles of inclusivity, materiality and completeness. Our statement provides additional obser-vations and recommendations.

In addition, some specific observations on each principle are given below:

InclusivityThe Guardian engages with its readers on an ongoing basis through opening many of the articles on its website for comment. Recently, readers were invited to comment on which subjects they would like to see covered in the environment blog. These comments are an important way for read-ers to engage with the Guardian and shape

the news they read.Mutualisation of news is a significant

step in being more inclusive and could represent a step change in involving stakeholders in decision-making around the Guardian’s key sustainability impact – its content.

MaterialityThe report describes the process the Guardian has adopted to identify the priority issues for its sustainability pro-gramme and report. Generally, the report covers the majority of material issues a media organisation would be expected to include.

However, we would usually expect to see performance information on health and safety of employees. The clear accept-ance that editorial is its main impact sepa-rates the Guardian from most of its peers. We would like to see greater systemati-sation of the Guardian’s material issue assessment and recommend further work on this in the coming year, well ahead of the year end reporting cycle.

ResponsivenessThe annual readers’ survey is used to understand readers’ views and expecta-tions of the Guardian’s sustainability pro-gramme. This year, the results were not available as the report was written and will be published on the sustainability website in due course.

Earlier in the year, the Guardian under-took an employee opinion survey and we noted responses were encouraging despite the significant changes under way. Nev-ertheless, the survey identified a number of areas for improvement and in order to address these there needs to be a clear process in place for departments to iden-tify and implement actions.

Separately, internal workshops and a survey on inclusiveness were undertaken which identified a number of concerns around how inclusive the organisation actually is. Again, a clear programme of improvement actions needs to be agreed and implemented to support the work that has already started in the area of diver-sity.

Performance informationWe checked performance claims made by the guardian and where errors were identi-fied these have been corrected. Based on the work undertaken to check the data and


other performance information we have not found any evidence that the Guardian’s performance is not properly reported.

We used the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) quality of information principles as the criteria for evaluating performance information. We noted within opera-tions a more streamlined and systematic approach to gathering data across environ-mental indicators from the print sites. In particular, the paper database is a strong tool for collating this data. Waste data will need to be an area of focus follow-ing changes in the contractor collecting waste.

The clarity and comparability of per-formance information, particularly within operations, would be enhanced through the use of graphs or summary tables that include systematic comparisons with prior years and benchmarks.

Editorial is one of the most challenging areas for providing performance informa-tion, and currently this is mainly qualita-tive. It would be helpful to support this with further quantitative indicators. These may be identified through the Guardian’s current work with the GRI media sector supplement.

• Two Tomorrows (Europe) Ltd

Documents

Sustainability report 2010 1 Sustainability report