Guardian News & Media Reviews

Pros

I work in the US office in New York on the Commercial/ side of the business, as part of the Client Services team which supports our US Sales team. The company treats their employees extremely well, and the work culture and environment in my opinion is unmatched. On a personal level, the team is warm, inclusively and the environment truly fosters a close-knit team. On a work level, the team is extremely supportive of one another, encouraging and collaborative - there is really a team mentality and everyone is very supportive of others successes. The benefits are also amazing!

Cons

The US team is rather small, so at times the work load is overwhelming, and many times you are putting in more work and time than it feels like you should be for salary. Also, being that The Guardian US is such a small organization, there is not much room for growth, unless there are new roles created.

Pros

Easy job with low stress.

Cons

None I can think of.

Pros

-excellent colleagues -outstanding journalism; it's a privilege to work for a paper that breaks the types of stories we do -in NY office at least, people are open to ideas and will try to support them whenever they can

Cons

-can be slow and clunky b/c too many management levels -feels like there's an impenetrable inner circle so can feel hard to see how you can progress -poor formal development structure

Pros

diverse staff, great resources, comfortable environment

Cons

divided office, not enough integration of commercial and editorial

Pros

Great Location, most things on are within walking distance from fast food to artisan coffee, international travel hub to escape rooms, you can find it all there. Majority of the people who work that are really nice, they believe in the larger organization and what it stands for, proud to be part of that workforce. Friends for life can and will be made behind that glass facia, be it, sitting/standing at your desk, while walking through the glass walled corridors or at the canal side water hole.

Cons

Disconnect between senior management and the rest of the workforce. Clique is a word that springs to mind when thinking about senior management. Pay is not the best, not the worst but should you leave and do a similar job, you soon realize you could of been getting paid a whole lot more somewhere else. Feels very much like, who you know rather than what you know is the key to advancement and if you don't fit into certain molds or get seen in the right places with the right people, it can really make you wonder about certain appointments shall we say. Used to be a known for pushing the envelope within recruitment in terms of what it offered, now just feels like its serving up cold 2nds from someone else's menu.

Pros

Best journalists in the UK. Talented pool of editors and production staff who clearly care about doing a good job. Great digital teams, motivated by passionate managers. Heritage brand that has good recognition.

Cons

Next-to-no career progression. Most of the aged staff are sitting it out until pension age, with no incentive to learn new skills that might make them useful in the meantime. It pays to stay in place. If you are under 60 years old and lucky enough to find a promotion opportunity, you will be paid a lot (in my case a third) less than your predecessor, even if you have more experience, skills and motivation. Rotten. A lot of issues are caused by the disconnect between the Guardian's idea of itself and the reality. It would love to think of itself as a diverse digital upstart with a flat hierarchy and a motivated, diverse team full of great ideas. In reality it is an Edwardian institution that still puts the newspaper before everything else and has a very rigid hierarchy. This causes problems because those senior editors have no clue about digital and no reason to learn, and they are running the place. Because of the pretension of a flat hierarchy, these old white senior editors have to constantly reassert their authority, making it a darkly oppressive public school environment. No management training, which you find causes a lot of misery when you scratch the surface. A lot of people fail upwards due to length of service. Upper management is deeply out-of-touch, wrong-headed and a/immoral. They seem to be willingly clueless, ignoring results of staff surveys in favour of their gut feeling. The Editor-in-Chief, for example, attributed the terminally low morale of the entire company to 'being away from the office', despite staff surveys saying that WFH had worked much better for their mental health. Instead of basic transference, she might have recognised that her team's leadership through the pandemic was the problem. They decided Covid was an opportunity not to support her struggling staff, but to cut numbers via payouts (only talented staff who have a chance of re-employment leave when offered a way out), kill off all the weekend supplements without a proper plan, cause months of job uncertainty and anxiety due to talk about 'restructuring' with no detail, and freeze everyone's pay for a third year running. All this while staff exhausted themselves with no support during the most testing time in modern history to make it a successful financial year for the company. The staff had to threaten to strike to force action on pay. It's a horrendous way to manage people and many talented people left through disgust. Even Boris Johnson has the decency to pay lip service to the pain his bungling actions cause. The interim CEO seems to be a basic marketing man, propped up by a powerless Editor. Clueless and self-congratulatory is a terrible combination in management, but, at the Guardian, it is sadly the norm. There is no-one in control.