The 200-year-old nonprofit newspaper has turned the gorgeous 19th century railroad goods shed opposite their King’s Cross office into an event space, and members can attend stellar, intimate events with Vivienne Westwood, Russell Brand, Jimmy Page, Naomi Klein and more.
The membership subs go to support the newspaper’s award-winning, public-interest investigative journalism, which included the Snowden leaks and the Wikileaks dumps, as well as the Parliamentary expenses scandal. They’re turning that news into live events — it’s newspaper as performance art.
The event-space/member’s club will also have a 3D printing lab, a coffee house, a restaurant, galleries, and spaces.
I’ve joined as a founding member.
But (as the music industry has found) the more digital the world becomes, so the appetite for physical meet-ups and live events grows. The Guardian’s journey into this live world, which began modestly with our open weekend in 2012, is about to begin with a soft launch, or (in digital language) beta phase. We would love as many of you as possible to be part of it, and to contribute your own thoughts to help us shape how the scheme develops.
The greatest Guardian editor, CP Scott, wrote perhaps the most famous essay on journalism ever written, to mark the paper’s centenary in 1921. By then he had not only edited the paper for 46 years, he had also become its owner. This was his vision of what the Guardian should be:
A newspaper has two sides to it. It is a business, like any other, and has to pay in the material sense in order to live. But it is much more than a business; it is an institution; it reflects and it influences the life of a whole community; it may affect even wider destinies. … It plays on the minds and consciences of men. It may educate, stimulate, assist, or it may do the opposite. It has, therefore, a moral as well as a material existence, and its character and influence are in the main determined by the balance of these two forces.
Alan Rusbridger: welcome to Guardian Membership [Alan Rusbridger/The Guardian]
(Disclosure: I write a column for the Guardian; no one from the Guardian contacted me about this story or asked me to write about it)