“COMMENT is free, but facts are sacred” wrote C.P. Scott, a great editor of the Manchester Guardian, as the newspaper was known until 1959. The trouble is it’s getting harder to make money from either. Many British newspapers are under pressure as print revenues fall and digital advertising struggles to fill the gap. But the Guardian’s rapid online expansion in recent years and its rising costs mean its position is particularly precarious. So far it has struggled to translate its approximately 155m unique monthly online browsers into higher digital-ad revenues.

This hit home as the Guardian Media Group (GMG), its parent company, announced pre-tax losses of £173m ($264m) on July 27th, its biggest ever dip into the red. Some £104m of this comes from GMG writing down the value of its stake in Ascential, a publicly listed information and events company, as well as additional restructuring costs. But that still leaves GMG with a loss of £69m. And given the Guardian’s substantial presence online, the decline in GMG’s digital revenue, from £84m in 2015 to £82m, may be of most concern, even though for now the fall is slight.

The Scott Trust, GMG’s sole shareholder, is tasked with protecting the newspaper in perpetuity. But GMG’s cash and investment funds declined from £838m in 2015 to £765m this year. It is not lost on anyone, including the paper’s journalists, that the money could continue ebbing away, even raising the possibility of the Guardian closing.

The paper has already shifted its strategy under its new editor, Katherine Viner, and GMG’s new chief executive, David Pemsel. It wants to collect more information about online readers, reduce costs by a fifth, and find new ways to earn revenue. The workforce is being pruned. The paper’s online readers are being encouraged to sign up as “members”, donating anywhere from £49 to £599 per year, in exchange for privileged access to the paper’s events and functions. Loyal to the paper’s take on the world, they could contribute as much as one third of GMG’s revenue within three years, Mr Pemsel hopes. In time, members may also be granted access to content not available to non-paying readers.

That would be a momentous change. The paper’s previous editor, Alan Rusbridger, was firmly committed to online journalism with no paywalls and the Guardian amassed a huge online following in America, Australia and elsewhere under his leadership. It won America’s Pulitzer prize in 2014 for its (free) coverage of the Edward Snowden revelations. Mr Rusbridger is said not to have backed Ms Viner as his successor, and the paper’s shift in strategy contributed to his decision in May to stand down as incoming chair of the Scott Trust.

Even with free articles and other content online, GMG could surely target adverts more effectively if it knew more about its readers. And “native advertising”, where ads are made in the same style as editorial content, could prove an area of growth. Such ads often hold readers’ attention for longer, which allows publishers to charge advertisers more for them. The Guardian already produces them, and in January it began labeling them more clearly as “paid content”.

Yet digital advertising is becoming a scale game that Google and Facebook dominate. Advertisers spend lavishly in just a handful of media while smaller, niche websites are obliged to try paywalls and seek out other sources of revenue. One view in the newspaper business is that the Guardian may end up caught in the middle: too generalist for a strategy based on readers paying for content they can’t do without, and too tiny to reel in sizeable online-advertising deals. But now at least, under new leadership, GMG seems readier to investigate all the options.