This year was the most challenging and extraordinary for news that I can remember, and I’m sure many of you feel the same way. It affected everything about how we live, love and work and in many ways it’s changed us all forever.
At the start of the crisis, at the Guardian, we were already under considerable pressure with the decline of print newspapers and the effects of sweeping changes in the digital world. Now, with coronavirus running rampant, our offices almost empty and our newspaper retailers shuttered, we were facing another formidable blow.
We knew the best way through this was to let our readers know the urgency of the situation and encourage more to join us.
“News is under threat, just when we need it most,” we wrote. At a time when people desperately needed straight, authoritative, useful, independent journalism about the pandemic and were reading and watching and listening to it in record numbers, that journalism faced a powerful threat. “We need your support to help fill the gap,” we said.
Almost a year later, no one knows how quickly and robustly our economies will bounce back in 2021 and beyond. But we do know one thing: we’d have been a lot worse off were it not for the hundreds of thousands of readers who answered our call. Thank you.
In 2020, financial support for the Guardian from digital readers in every corner of the world has grown prodigiously, as readers seek out expert journalism and analysis they can trust.
The Guardian has gained 268,000 new digital subscriptions and recurring contributions over the last year – that’s an increase of 43%, and a joining rate of one person every two minutes. Total digital recurring support now stands at more than 900,000 people, up from 632,000 only a year ago.
There were further waves of support during our coverage of the Black Lives Matter protests, our climate pledge commitment and the US elections. Many supporters believe, like we do, that everyone deserves access to high-quality journalism.
Keeping Guardian journalism open has meant that our work has been read more broadly and deeply than ever before. In 2020, the number of unique browsers accessing Guardian journalism surged past 2 billion, a monumental number of people across the globe. On average this year, Guardian pages have been loaded digitally more than 600 times every second around the world.
In March, a few days before the first national lockdown was announced in the UK, as Covid-19 was starting to cause mayhem across the world, I wrote that Guardian journalism on the coronavirus crisis would concentrate broadly on three things: the science, the politics and the people. Our coverage sought to foreground the science and the latest data, in context and in an accessible way; to hold governments and the scientific establishment to account and expose incompetence; and to bring empathy and humanity to the stories of the victims.
Our work on everything from care homes to PPE, from Dominic Cummings breaking lockdown to the back-to-school fiasco has demonstrated once again the role that journalism plays in a good society. Our aim is that our reporting forces the powerful to be accountable and to be fairer, kinder, more transparent; our aim is that the world is a better place as a result. This is what we try to do with the funding our supporters so generously give to us.
When we asked people why they signed up to support us, the same responses came back: we need truthful, independent reporting, now more than ever; we need free, open journalism for all, funded by those who can, so that those who can’t are able to remain informed.
“During Covid-19 it was important for me to have access to independent information,” new supporter Mary Barkes told us. “I was very much enjoying the Guardian and could see the requests for support. I like how I was able to access most things for free, I felt it was very generous which made me feel more inclined to want to be a financial supporter.”
For Maeve McCann, it was about integrity – the provision of information independent of an agenda set by a rich owner or other influencers.
“As a science researcher I seek a high level of journalistic integrity in what I read,” she wrote. “I seek news, facts and opinions without the influence of business or an agenda. For that reason the Guardian is the newspaper which I continually return to read everyday. It is a source I trust.
“Thank you for giving a voice to the people who need to be heard and telling the stories that we all need to learn from.”
We are living through a momentous era – not only the Covid-19 crisis but also the Black Lives Matter movement, Brexit, the post-Trump world, not to mention the ominous climate crisis which looms larger every day. These are times for the Guardian to double down on what we do: reporting on the ground, pursuing complicated and time-consuming investigations, and holding the powerful to account, both nationally and internationally.
If you were one of those who answered our call, thank you. From all of us here, to all of you, thank you for helping us not just survive this year, but deliver some of the greatest journalism in our history. Your funding in 2020 helped us to do what we do best: investigate, explain, challenge, expose, amplify the voices that would otherwise be silenced … and to try to bring hope.
See you in 2021.
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Read more about our work through this challenging year in our 2020 report and video here
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Throughout 2020, Guardian journalists have worked round the clock to dig out the truth about the pandemic. Because good journalism can help save lives. Support independent media. Support the Guardian.