Guardian editor-in-chief Katharine Viner is preparing to lead the news organisation on a “transformative project” to “build a sustainable future” as she marks ten years at the helm.
Viner revealed in an interview with Press Gazette that The Guardian has secured funding for a multi-year transformation programme from owners the Scott Trust board.
The Guardian grew revenue by 7% to £276m in its last financial year and made a loss (cash outflow) of £24m. But the Scott Trust can draw down on a £1.25bn endowment fund.
The transformation project is expected to see The Guardian producing more video and audio as it becomes “more visual, digital and experimental”. The title also plans to work more globally and collaboratively between its UK, US and Australian operations.
“When lots of organisations are cutting, we’re doing proper investment in those aspects over many years,” Viner said, “and it’s going to be a transformative project for The Guardian, I think.”
Viner noted that The Guardian currently publishes “two novels’ worth of words every 24 hours and one Instagram reel. Now, we do more Instagram posts than that, but obviously that balance isn’t right.”
The project, which was commissioned about six months ago, is intended to help The Guardian respond to an industry-wide decline in search traffic since the arrival of tools like Google AI Overviews and ChatGPT, as well as shifting audience behaviour.
Viner said The Guardian “actually hasn’t seen the impact that I know others have seen, but it’s it’s a fact of the industry”. The Guardian was the second biggest online newsbrand in the UK in August, behind only the BBC, with an audience of 21.6 million people. It was the seventh biggest in the world by visits.
She also referenced “audience fragmentation – we know that people get their news, or at least their information, from lots of different places now, and they’ve really changed their behaviours – not just young audiences, either”.
Describing AI as “both an opportunity and a risk”, she said the advantage of news organisations like The Guardian is “how much stuff we do that AI can’t do… AI can’t hold the powerful to account. AI can’t do on-the-ground reporting.”
‘No-brainers’ like expanding Guardian social team to come first
Viner said 500 Guardian staff had attended voluntary ideas sessions to discuss how to combat these threats, adding: “Not a single idea in this project wasn’t suggested by a colleague in one of those meetings.” The Guardian employed 913 editorial staff on average in its last financial year.
Two executive editors have already been seconded from their regular jobs to lead the project for the next two years: Christian Bennett, executive editor of visual journalism, and Fay Schlesinger, head of national news.
The rest of the current financial year (which started on 1 April) is about doing the things that are “no-brainers”, Viner said, such as growing the “fantastic” but “tiny” social team. Bigger, more strategic changes will follow from April 2026.
Jobs are expected to be created in areas like design, video, pictures and visuals globally as well as in the UK.
Viner highlighted the global opportunity, and the fact that “a lot of people in the UK aren’t really aware of just how big our Guardian US and Guardian Australia teams are”.
By the end of the current, ongoing period of investment in the US (including in politics, arts, media, science, tech, soccer and shopping content in New York and Washington DC) the team on that side of the Atlantic will comprise more than 200 people (up from 160 in November 2024).
“I think digital reader revenue has really unlocked Guardian America as well so it is now very profitable,” Viner said.
“And what we feel we could do more of is what we publish could have a bigger impact in each place. So we’re going to hire people to coordinate it all better.”
She pointed to the news of Donald Trump last week announcing his heavily disputed claim that Tylenol, known as paracetamol in the UK, can cause autism when used by pregnant women.
“The word Tylenol doesn’t mean anything in the UK. The word paracetamol doesn’t mean anything in the US. Who do you write those stories for? How do you write them? How do you frame them? …
“We need people whose job it is to think about that and how to maximise impact. Again, so much of what we’re doing here is about maximising impact for what we do.”
Ten years as Guardian editor-in-chief: ‘So much change in one era’
Viner became editor-in-chief of The Guardian in June 2015 after a year leading the news publisher’s US operation (she beat Ian Katz and Janine Gibson after receiving the most votes in an ‘indicative’ staff ballot). She was also previously deputy editor of The Guardian and launched Guardian Australia in 2013.
Viner’s ten years as editor so far have seen, as she put it, “so much change in one era”.
Her mission statement to staff when asking for their votes back in 2015 was that she wanted to expand beyond Australia and the US so the brand becomes “truly global”. “We need to reframe everything we do to speak to a worldwide audience,” she said.
Now, Viner said The Guardian has a “much bigger audience outside the UK than we used to, a lot bigger outside our home country than almost every other news organisation in the world” – a change that has come with revenue growth and diversification.
The Guardian moved into profit for the first time in a generation in 2021/22 and is now reporting losses again as it focuses on investment.
Viner also highlighted her efforts to make The Guardian team in the UK more diverse in terms of gender, race and social background: “It’s much more mixed and diverse than I think people expect when they come here.”
But above all the past decade has seen a more digital transformation at The Guardian, as it has for most major news organisations.
“I think what you mean by becoming more digital has changed so much. If you think ten years ago, that basically meant a website, and maybe some podcasts, if you’re lucky, but now it’s on every front.”
This has combined with the growth of the digital reader revenue strategy (first launched in July 2014), which Viner pointed out was “actually an editorial invention… because commercially people think it’s very odd the idea that, why would people pay for something you can get for free.
“But the way we frame it is people pay for something in order that other people can get it for free. And that’s been an extremely effective model that is doing better and better year on year all the time.”
Digital reader revenue is now the biggest revenue type at The Guardian, at 39% of the £276m total in the year to 31 March 2025.
These changes all happened against a ten-year backdrop that, Viner said, has included major news stories including six UK prime ministers, Brexit, two Trump presidencies, the Covid-19 pandemic, the Grenfell Tower fire, and wars in Ukraine and the Middle East.
The Guardian’s own agenda-setting investigations in that time have included: sexual offence allegations against actor Noel Clarke and DJ Tim Westwood, the Covid-19 lockdown breach by Boris Johnson’s advisor Dominic Cummings, the Pegasus project and Panama Papers leaks, historical allegations of sexual abuse in football, and Qatar’s World Cup working conditions.
“And that’s not nearly the half of it,” Viner said, adding: “There’s all of this going around, but my job is to make sure The Guardian meets the moment… there’s so much shifting, and I have to take this just slight step above the day to day and think, right, are we meeting the moment? Are we doing the right things?”
A highlight for Viner, because it was her “first big exclusive” as editor-in-chief and she “found it so emotionally affecting”, was the Windrush scandal of Caribbean migrants facing deportation despite living in Britain for decades. Amelia Gentleman was named Journalist of the Year at the British Journalism Awards in 2018 as a result.
The “ideal outcome” of the new transformation project, Viner said, would be that scoops like these “still manage to hit all the same traditional audiences we have before, but we also hit a lot of new audiences through different digital techniques and different formats, so that we end up reaching a lot more people with any of our stories”.
She added: “Obviously you wouldn’t do that on every story. We’re still committed to the paper. Some things are appropriate for the paper. Something might be paper only. Something might be video only. But I think for a big story, that is your ideal outcome.
“I mean, at the moment, we get a big story, it usually will have a podcast attached for example. It will usually have a video explainer attached. It will usually have all sorts of stuff attached already, but I think it’s the next stage of that. We’re very excited.”
Noel Clarke trial was ‘expensive, time consuming, unpleasant’
A major event in Viner’s editorship so far has been defending The Guardian’s journalism at London’s High Court when it was sued by Noel Clarke for libel.
The trial took place this year and Mrs Justice Steyn ruled in August that The Guardian had successfully argued both that the articles about Clarke were substantially true and that Viner and her team had honestly believed it was in the public interest to publish.
Viner told Press Gazette the trial, which saw more than 20 women testify to the truth of The Guardian’s reporting as well as multiple journalists who worked on the story, was “extremely expensive, extremely time consuming, very unpleasant”. Clarke has been ordered to make an initial £3m payment towards The Guardian’s estimated £6m costs from defending the case.
She said she was “relieved” it was over and “proud of the team that we were so strongly vindicated in court”.
She noted that they were “very lucky” to have an owner like the Scott Trust whose role is to safeguard The Guardian’s journalistic freedom – noting that at one point Clarke said he wanted to seek £70m in damages if his case was successful.
“That might have spooked some owners, but it didn’t spook the Scott Trust. So I knew we had them at our back.”
Viner said she felt it would have been “pretty tough” to say “sorry, we’ve decided to settle” to the more than 20 women who had trusted The Guardian with their stories.
And she said she felt they could “definitely fight for this” in court because of the strength of the work done by journalists Sirin Kale and Lucy Osborne.
“The work they did, talking to sources, corroborating their stories, you know, really deep investigative work – I was so impressed. They just asked the right questions every step of the way. I thought it’s a fantastic piece of work.”
Viner praised Mrs Justice Steyn and her ruling, saying “she understands journalistic processes so well… she understood comprehensively what we did and what we’re trying to do, how we tried to be fair, that we only published things that we thought we could back up.
“It was such a vindication to see that in black and white.”
Viner said the process and the judgment demonstrated that “a lot of rigour was needed”.
“I think the way they [Kale and Osborne] did that report is a complete model for other journalists to do investigations into Me Too. But it’s a very high bar.
“It was very much: did you have any Whatsapp messages that you sent at the time? Did you tell anyone at the time? Can I talk to that person? Do you have any notebooks, you know, diary items that you wrote at the time? It was so rigorous…
“I think that the lesson is to be very, very thoughtful and careful about record keeping and public interest memos. Our PI memo was pages and pages and pages, all pre-publication.”
One such memo drafted by head of investigations Paul Lewis stated: “We agreed at that meeting to proceed towards publication, although it was agreed that care would be taken in the writing of any article, to ensure that the severity of allegations was not overstated, and to ensure that the article fairly reflected Clarke’s position on all of the matters raised.”
More broadly, Viner warned that the atmosphere around libel threats currently is “frightening, particularly what Trump is setting the model for, in terms of how to talk about journalism, how to talk about journalists, and vexatious legal behaviour”.
The Guardian is now being sued in the US by the world’s largest healthcare company, United Health Group, after reporting it was secretly paying nursing homes to reduce hospital transfers. United Health said the idea it has prevented hospital transfers is “verifiably false”.
The Guardian is standing by its reporting and has filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit on grounds including substantial truth, lack of actual malice and fair report privilege.
Katharine Viner ‘not worrying too much about the past or future’ of editorship
The Guardian’s three most recent editors before Viner each stayed in post for almost exactly 20 years: Alastair Hetherington (1956-1975), Peter Preston (1975-1995) and Alan Rusbridger (1995-2015).
When Press Gazette suggested Viner could be halfway through her tenure she noted that CP Scott, former owner of The Manchester Guardian (now The Guardian), was editor for 57 years between 1872 and 1929.
But she said: “I think it’s all about meeting the moment you’re in and not worrying too much about the past or the future.”
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