By Giuseppe De Santis
Good news for nationalists as our campaign aimed to bankrupt The Guardian and The Observer is making life extremely painful for those two rags.
In fact senior figures at Guardian News & Media (GNM) are seriously discussing the move to an entirely online operation leaving its editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger increasingly isolated.

The longstanding Guardian chief wants to develop the Guardian’s digital-only US operation before pulling the plug on the print edition, in the hope that it will provide a useful blueprint for the online business in Britain.

However, trustees of the Scott Trust, GNM’s ultimate owner, fear it does not have enough cash on its books to sustain the newspapers for that long, according to More About Advertising, the website run by former Marketing Week editor Stephen Foster.

The Guardian publisher has spent the last few years battling to stem losses of £44m a year.

However, it has been slow to make savings and any money that it has clawed back has been spent on expanding its US and online operations.
The investments helped to fuel a 16pc increase in digital revenues to £45.7m last year, but this was not enough to balance GNM’s operating losses which widened from £31.1m.

Guardian Media Group, GNM's parent company which also owns stakes in Autotrader's publisher, Trader Media Group, and Top Right Group, the magazine and events company formerly known as Emap, fared even worse.

Its operating losses more than doubled to £129.1m after nearly £55m of write-offs.

Last year, GNM also looked at closing the £80m printing plant it opened seven years ago, and moving its Berliner printing presses to Trinity Mirror’s Watford plant.

But now it seems more likely to stop running the presses altogether.

A GNM spokesman denied that it intends to stop printing newspapers, saying they would “remain the foundations of our organisation for many years to come”.

The newspapers generate three quarters of GNM’s revenues but do not turn a profit.

The idea to axe the print editions is now new and indeed the GNM's plan to turn the two titles into digital newspapers was conceived several years ago and this is why it invested a lot of money in digital technologies.

The problem is that digital revenues are only a fraction of printing ones and no one knows if and how they can be increased and therefore the only way a digital-only operation can work is by reducing cost hugely and this means reducing workforce heavily.