The Guardian needs to behave more like a business The Guardian and Observer, whose left-leaning stances makes them a natural ally of the unions, have relied on a voluntary redundancy process to cut around 300 jobs over the last two and a half years. Now they have stopped coming forward. GMG launched a new search for 100 volunteers yesterday, but it is fishing in the same pool of staff that have already turned down the lure of a pay-off. Staff journalists at the Guardian work a nine-day fortnight and are entitled to a sabbatical every few years. Few want to give that up. Senior figures at the newspapers acknowledge it is only a matter of time before GMN is forced to make compulsory cuts - but for analysts, that time could not come soon enough. "They are in danger of a brain drain," says Roddy Davidson, a media analyst at Westhouse Securities. The people who will take voluntary redundancies in this environment are the most marketable ones. You've got to be careful of who you're left with. It is probably not within their culture to be aggressive but I think the time has come to change. Even after another 100 job losses, GNM will have more than 500 staff journalists on its books, producing newspapers that are not only shrinking in pagination, but whose circulations have dropped by more than 10pc each over the last year. The Guardian sold an average of 211,500 copies a day in June, whilst the Observer shifted 244,000. A senior executive admitted earlier this year that it is on a "mission" to be able to stand alone as a digital-only publication. It has been toying with different revenue streams, for example sounding out Guardian loyalists to see if they would pay to become part of some kind of super-fan club, but analysts are keen to see it implement a more conventional charging model. In the meantime, they are wary of GMG's heavy dependency on Trader Media Group and Top Right Group, both of which it co-owns with the private equity firm, Apax. Trader Media Group has been making an impressive transition from an old print media business to a digital one, that could be sold of listed to help GMG buy some more time for its newspapers. You have to wonder to what extent they should be sacrificing successful businesses to sustain one for the newspapers, which are in decline. In business terms, it would be the wrong thing for GMG to do. Even Charles Prestwich Scott, the Guardian's most famous editor and a former owner after whom the Scott Trust is named, warned that a newspaper "is a business like any other, and has to pay in the material sense in order to live." GMG does not exist purely for business reasons, of course. But unless it starts behaving more like one, it may not exist at all.