Last year, the Guardian ran an entire advertising campaign with the tag line ‘Not For Sale’. It put up billboards in the streets pointing out it was ‘reader funded not billionaire backed’.

So, why would it seek to sell off a huge chunk of the organisation and 70+ journalists….to a financially precarious start-up financed by a bunch of VCs and... See more

One argument is that pre-internet, journalists had a more reliable source of revenue, enabling them to do more investigative work, and the business model shift to online advertising meant they'd now have to produce popular pieces more frequently.