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The Guardian, financed through a trust created by its then owners in the Thirties, has traditionally been organised as something like a private-equity firm, with investments in a variety of businesses whose profits went to supporting a newspaper. Earlier this year, with the newspaper costing more than the investments yielded, it liquidated most of its holdings, converting itself into an entity more like a wealth-management company or, perhaps, even a family office, wherein capital could be tapped to support the interest of the family.

One of those interests is Edward Snowden - at a cost far from accounted for.

Curiously, the *Guardian * may well be the best-funded newspaper in the world. But, at its current losses, there is also something finite to that money - even a willingness for it to be finite.

Between business discipline and philosophical mission, it would choose the latter. Between exigencies and martyrdom, martyrdom.

The Guardian has a kind of wildly speculative confidence that it could become an American voice. Not just a British voice in America.

I have written periodically for the *Guardian * for more than a decade. Most recently I contributed to what it has portrayed as something of a life-or-death effort to transport a new version of the

Guardian to the US, giving me a sideline view of the effect of the Snowden story, not just on readers or the political world, but on the organisation that produced it. The cost of heroism, if you will.

US expansion has long been a Guardian dream. For some years now, there has been no growth left for it in the UK market - with circulation and advertising in perilous decline - but the US market seemed to the

Guardian management full of opportunities for a serious but stylish, left-leaning news outlet. The obvious models, albeit on something of the opposite political spectrum, were the

*Financial Times * and the Economist, which had adroitly managed to internationalise their brands with an investment in US distribution (quite a substantial investment). But the Guardian was looking for something more, something transformational. Like Superman blasting off from the doomed planet of Krypton, or the Corleone family leaving New York for Vegas, or even like Rupert Murdoch, the

Guardian's bugbear, outgrowing London and moving his headquarters to New York, the Guardian, by setting up shop in Manhattan - on the corner of Spring Street and Broadway in Soho - had a kind of spunky or wildly speculative confidence that it could become an American voice. Not just a British voice in the US.

The planned expansion was all the more gutsy - or harebrained - not just because introducing a media brand in the US market is a complicated and expensive effort, but because there was no clear way for the Guardian, even if it were to become a clarion voice, to make money in the US. It had no plan to sell online subscriptions - it was actually opposed to making people pay. And it had only a theoretical notion of how to sell ads in the US and, indeed, a mostly dismal record as a sales organisation.

A finite and dwindling amount of capital in most enterprises means a fierce competition about how to deploy it, usually with an emphasis on limiting risks and eschewing larger visions. But the *Guardian * - again rather like its nemesis, the Murdoch organisation - makes its bets and sets its direction with remarkable singularity and unanimity. Debate is absent, beyond the most ritual kind.

While the *Guardian * has a business staff with a CEO, and is overseen by trustees with ultimate responsibility, it has one real power centre, strategic thinker and moral compass: its editor, Alan Rusbridger. (A kind of preternatural consensus surrounds Rusbridger, but underneath him the *Guardian * is a fraught political cauldron, with underlings struggling to align with him, stay in his favour and undercut everyone else who is trying: "a nest of vipers", in the description of an outside consultant brought in to work on one of the paper's big redesign projects.)

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The 60-year-old Rusbridger is, surely, among the most talented newspaper editors of his generation (the other, at the opposite end of the news and philosophical spectrum, is Paul Dacre at the Daily Mail) and, as well, the most opaque, sending cryptic messages in a cipher which no one person can completely decode.

An hour with him is both unpleasant in the exertions required to penetrate his lack of transparency and fill the conversational void and, yet, at the same time, uplifting and restorative. The vacuum that surrounds him somehow seems to represent moral superiority and it draws you in. Six different people of high rank at the paper have said to me, on different occasions, the following words: "I would do anything for Alan."

These are not words you usually hear in a modern company; they are not even credible. But they suggest the Guardian's sense of purpose and the potency of its Kool-Aid. (I once sat next to Rusbridger's wife at a *Guardian * dinner; she kept referencing what seemed like a wholly different person, a normal, fallible, workaday chap named "Al". Weird.)

His is an absolute, pre-modern sort of power, faith-based and exclusionary. You believe or you don't.

You are in or you are out. You are family or you are not. Emily Bell, once a potential Rusbridger successor, who was at the

*Guardian * for the better part of two decades (coming in through the Guardian's acquisition of the Observer- ever an unresolved relationship), told me, after she left several years ago to take a teaching position in the US, "I never really was an insider."

Rusbridger has run the place since 1995 and, in some less-than-rational way, its future exists wholly in his head or at his whim. Not only is there enormous deference to him and dependence on him, but a sense of the abyss at any suggestion that he might leave (he is often suggested for eminent positions at places like the Royal Opera House).

Rusbridger has maintained two dominant ideas about the Guardian's future: going digital and going to the US.

The *Guardian * has been as aggressive as any legacy news organisation in developing its digital strategy and resources: both with as much success and, as well, losing as much money. Digital has been the harbinger of the move into the American market, where ever-growing traffic numbers have suggested that the *Guardian * has a ready audience.

Rusbridger has been plotting his US move since at least 2003, when the start of the Iraq war showed significant US traffic to the *Guardian * site. His idea then, closer to the *FT * and Economist, was to begin print distribution in the US. But on further study, the costs shocking him, he settled for a small Washington office with a discrete digital presence, where a succession of US editors and business -advisors, all perceived as outsiders, have complained about an inability to get the attention of Rusbridger or anyone else in London.

Meanwhile, in the UK, the Guardian's fortunes continued a swift decline. The UK newspaper market was roiled by a sudden shift, beginning with the Independent, of quality broadsheets turning tabloid. This was a crisis of identity for the resolutely broadsheet Guardian. Rusbridger assembled a secret team to rethink the Guardian's sense of physical self and finally emerged with a newly designed, modern newspaper, in miniature format, which was expected to revolutionise or, anyway, galvanise, newspaper reading. (I was out in the cold as a *Guardian * friend for a few years for describing it in *Vanity Fair * as resembling "a lady's purse".) While the new look buoyed the paper in the short term, its circulation is now lower than it was before the redesign.

Although the paper's fortunes continued to plummet, it moved to a sparkling new headquarters in King's Cross, sending a mixed signal to the staff - otherwise encouraged to abjure all frills and worry about the organisation's future - producing a sense of sheepishness or "I see nothing" among the faithful, but, perhaps tellingly, no real resentment.

Then came hacking, and the Guardian's heroic, single-minded, quixotic, obsessive and successful - pick your word - effort to bring down the Murdoch organisation in the UK. The hacking story was all David and Goliath (with Murdoch lieutenants often promising a gossip campaign against Rusbridger himself) until the *Guardian * broke it wide open in the summer of 2011 with the smoking-gun revelation that the *News Of The World * had hacked the phone of a murder victim, 13-year-old Milly Dowler, deleting her voicemails and cruelly leading her family to believe she was still alive. As it happens, the *Guardian * got this crucial part of the story wrong: no deletions had occurred. But on that key error the

*News Of The World * closed, the *Guardian * prevailed and Murdoch was hoisted.

And then there was WikiLeaks and the Guardian's partnership with Julian Assange. The Guardian's publication of stolen US State Department documents made it one of the most visible news organisations in the world. It was a development near comparable to when CNN, then a backwater cable channel, found itself as practically the sole US news organisation on the ground in Baghdad as the Gulf War began in 1990, elevating it to international renown. Except for one difference: the Guardian's economic prospects were not enhanced by Assange and WikiLeaks.

WikiLeaks, and more international traffic, encouraged Rusbridger to intensify his plans to make the move to the US, only by now it had become clear that it shouldn't be a print product. Indeed, the print product in the UK was increasingly seen as obsolete, openly considered a vestigial organ if not an albatross. The future would be a wholly digital one, with most of the Guardian's traffic coming from the US.

Still, getting rid of paper, printing and delivery costs, and ever-slimming down the staff, doesn't do anything if you have no revenue. The

*Guardian * had taken a moral position against paywalls - even as they were proving to be growing revenues sources for many papers - and, at the same time, seemed almost proudly inept when it came to selling advertising (in the UK, much of the

Guardian's advertising revenues, in something of a political deal or understanding, had come from public-sector recruitment listings - but budget cuts and digital listings have diminished this business). What's more, the common practice of junking up a web page with as many ad units as possible to increase revenue was, in the Guardian's view, just not done.

So the idea became... larger.

Rusbridger had the notion of the *Guardian * as a concept. One that reflected a community, and that could be converted into an experience, with conferences and more. At King's Cross, at Soho House in New York and at other Guardian-appropriate venues there were many dinners convened with "friends of the Guardian" - reverential affairs conducted by Rusbridger in which all large ideas were solicited, and trivial money-making concerns discouraged.

In the US, Rusbridger - with limited personal exposure to the country, and in many ways at a temperamental distance from it - hired former Channel 4 CEO Michael Jackson to create a formal plan for the move. Jackson had been in the US for more than a decade, first running USA Networks, a large cable programmer, and then as the head of content for IAC, Barry Diller's digital company. He was a Brit with deep US media experience who Rusbridger felt he could relate to.

Jackson saw his mandate as coming up with a plan to adapt the *Guardian * brand and product, uniquely British in nature - really quite foreign to Americans - and creating- a version that, while taking economic advantage of synergies with the UK version, was fundamentally tooled for the US audience and advertising market.

Rusbridger accepted the Jackson plan and then ignored it. Instead, he sent Janine Gibson - a *Guardian * lifer and Rusbridger factotum and alter ego, who had never worked in the US - to run the new office, hiring and investing at an impressive if not gob-smacking rate. A dishevelled figure always in need of a cigarette in nonsmoking Manhattan, she was tasked with producing an American version of the Guardian reminiscent of nothing so much as the British version.

One of the oddest aspects of the US launch was the confidence in London that Americans actually knew what the Guardian was

This was the fundamental question, and an endlessly debated one, about the US operation. Was it American or was it British? And had the various attributes of those two identities been adequately sorted? And how could they be if it still largely remained a British effort? And could there ever really be a non-Guardian Guardian? And could Rusbridger ever be less than the soul and vital centre of anything with the *Guardian * brand? One odd aspect of the US launch was the confidence in London that Americans actually knew what the Guardian was, that its north London identity and sensibility, its deep and uniquely British left-wing assumptions, could be easily absorbed by its US cultural equivalent (and what would that north London equivalent be? Brooklyn?).

Certainly, much of Gibson's initial positioning for the *Guardian US * seemed cockeyed and tone deaf. There was an early notion to make opposition to capital punishment one of the tent poles of the US editorial plan, and great enthusiasm to promote Occupy Wall Street, even as the movement was sinking with hardly a trace.

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Still, in the beginning, the US effort, lead by Brits with a smattering of Americans, seemed very much an enthusiastic start-up, shadowed by the existential issues of revenue, but buoyed by a throw-it-against-the-wall, let's-put-on-a-show, see-what-works, find-our-voice joie de vivre.

The Guardian's overt political side - often grating even to many of the faithful - has always been complemented or balanced by its lifestyle side, its culture, arts, film, media and food writing (the *Guardian * has been a leader in food journalism), all areas vastly more amenable to advertisers than its traditional politics, and a basis much better than news itself on which to make a news site self-sustaining.

And then came Snowden.

Or, really, first came Julian Assange and then came Edward Snowden - and the Guardian's noble, or opportunistic, desire (or both) to become the world's leading left-wing media brand and, indistinguishable in its own mind from that ambition, to save the world as it itself is elevated.

In part this goes right back to all that money in the bank. Should you spend it on big, expensive, money-losing stories in the hope that, long-term, their importance will redound to your own gain? Or do you hedge your bets more carefully?

This is, obviously, not a question asked openly - or not wisely asked, anyway. To do so affronts the journalistic principles that most journalistic institutions, and particularly the Guardian, would never openly affront. And yet these are the decisions that someone has to make - that are made.

Watergate, the mother of all anti-government journalism, was carried on the back of an immensely profitable Washington Post. A money-losing *Washington Post * invested in the Snowden story and was, not long after, sold as something like scrap (to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos).

Snowden and the *Post * sale are not necessarily connected but, nevertheless, its owners did not find Snowden reason enough to more firmly embrace the Post, and suggest that doing big, expensive news is a much more equivocal enterprise when you can't afford it - a circumstance the *Guardian * seems proud to try to defy.

Both business-wise and journalistically, doing the Snowden story was the obvious decision to make for the Guardian. Its efforts so far had hardly put it on the map in the US - and suddenly Snowden did. But the Guardian's investment was not only financial and journalistic but psychic. It was all in.

News outlets want to break big stories but at the same time not be overwhelmed by them - a certain detachment is well advised. It is an artful line. But the *Guardian * essentially went into the Edward Snowden business - and continues in it. It's a complex business, too: to ally yourself with larger-than-life, novelistic characters, first Assange, and then Snowden, and stranger-than-strange middle men, like the Guardian's contract columnist Glenn Greenwald, who brought in the story. The effort to pretend that the story is straight up good and evil, that this is journalism pure and simple, unalloyed public interest, without peculiar nuances and rabbit holes and obvious contradictions, is really quite a trick.

In an effort to pull off that trick, the Snowden brand - with hints of baby Jesus - and the *Guardian * brand - as something like God the father and protector - become nearly symbiotic. (The *Guardian * now campaigns fiercely for a Snowden pardon.)

The theoretically freewheeling *Guardian * locked itself down. Staff and contributor Twitter feeds were closely monitored for indications of Snowden or Greenwald deviations, with instant reprimands when any party-line divergence was spotted. The *Guardian * had become the story and its journalists had to observe a loyalty oath in covering it.

Other controversies were discouraged, with Gibson saying that the *Guardian * was too exposed on Snowden to put itself at further risk on other dicey stories - creating a sort of journalistic zero-sum game.

In the strange case of Emma Gilbey Keller, a longtime *Guardian * contributor and wife of former *New York Times * editor Bill Keller, a piece she wrote on the nature of a cancer patient's tweets about the illness generated objections from the subject and a surge of angry Twitter blowback. It was, without consultation with Gilbey, summarily removed, suggesting that the *Guardian * saw its defensive wall as the Twitterati good will - that it couldn't afford to antagonise its base.

The Guardian has broken the biggest story of the day - increased traffic, made people famous, changed history! - and been unable to monetise it

Organisationally, Snowden was overwhelming. "It all changed after last June [when the Snowden story broke]," according to one of the *Guardian * staffers I polled for this account. Most of the heavy lifting, decision-making and oxygen in the room was returned to London, creating the sense in New York of after-thought, or of leaving everybody in Manhattan twiddling their thumbs.

Rusbridger, whose Harry Potter look, cryptic speech and generally abstracted countenance make him a perplexing figure to Americans, flew in to make television appearances here, becoming the mystifying face of the

Guardian US. Or, really, he competed with the ill-tempered and doctrinaire Greenwald as the face of the Guardian US. (Confusing matters more, Greenwald, who had arrived a few months before the story broke, left the *Guardian * a few months after.)

The Snowden mood mixed real internal fright with fabulous self-dramatisation and shone a blinding light on *Guardian * virtue.

The Guardian as sensibility - a quirky, expressive, witty, culturally inclined point of view - was overwhelmed by the Guardian as pious mission, in which the issue is not only fidelity to the cause, but your standing in the way you relate to it. The cause is the core and the further away you are from it being central to your being (and capacity for self-dramatisation) the less good and relevant you are.

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What's more, Snowden, and the continuing great outpouring of attention around the story, made no money for the Guardian. This seemed inexplicable and dumbfounding to *Guardian * management. They had broken the biggest story of the day - vastly increased traffic, made people famous, changed history! - and been unable to monetise it. (At the annual Cannes Lions advertising festival, where media brands come to abjectly beg for advertising, the

*Guardian * hosted a dinner last summer that was wholly about how the Guardian was helping to save the world, and not at all about how it could help move the merchandise.)

And, too, Snowden hopelessly demoralised, and, in a sense, broke the Guardian US, or at least the people working on it.

The Snowden story was too imbued with worthiness and principles for staffers to object to it (indeed, that would have been the end of your *Guardian * membership), but in a quieter way the organisation rebelled: key players in the New York office left, including many of the top editors and writers, the CEO of Guardian US, as well as Glenn Greenwald himself. The replacement team is vastly younger and cheaper, and, one suspects, even more temporary.

Gibson herself returns to London this summer, either as a reward for shepherding the Snowden story or, in ambiguous *Guardian * fashion, as a sort of punishment for the management turmoil provoked by the story, in which she merely gets her old job back. (The Guardian, as in its falling out with Julian Assange, often finds it necessary to protect its virtue by standing on both sides of a situation.)

Gibson is theoretically one of three people positioned as a potential Rusbridger heir - but the consensus is that the three are such unlikely successors that Rusbridger's position remains inviolable.

What has actually been accomplished? What progress made?

In a more generalised accounting, the Guardian and many others would surely argue that the world is wiser for the Snowden revelations (others argue that Snowden, in his Russian redoubt, clouds the issue of modern spycraft). For itself, the *Guardian * - which, along with the Washington Post, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for the Snowden revelations - has advanced its brand standing. But then again, its brand might now represent less an eclectic news outlet than an earnest conduit for rogue information.

Perhaps, in the Guardian's deepest sense of itself and, in the left-wing imagination, that is a noble future, if not a particularly lucrative one. But, you can see how that might eclipse the other business - the milder, quirkier, more profitable sensibility stuff. Or see how that's a balancing act which the *Guardian * might not be able to afford or have the management acumen to pull off.

The success of the Snowden story, at the expense of the New York operation, has many people in the Guardian US constellation - or, now, diaspora - wondering about the future of New York. There is a sense that the gravitational pull is back to north London, that however much it seeks a world beyond, however much it tries to break out, however much it strives to transform, the *Guardian * will ultimately invest its money in staying the same.

Postscript: Janine Gibson became one of the key factors in the recent firing of New York Times executive editor, Jill Abramson. Abramson offered Gibson a co-number-two position with deputy managing editor, Dean Baquet, without, according to Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger, first discussing this with Baquet as she had assured Sulzberger she had. Baquet had worked with Gibson on the Snowden material that the Guardian was sharing with the Times and they are both reported to have intensely disliked each other. Baquet is said to have told Sulzberger he would resign if Gibson were hired. Sulzberger chose Baquet over Gibson and Abramson. [/i]

Originally published in the July 2014 issue of British GQ.