Does it matter? It's not as if The Guardian bought Snowden's information in a bidding race. Snowden trusted Greenwald, who happened to be associated with The Guardian.

A newspaper should be judged on quality. If this leads to more income, all the better.

Right. We want doing responsible journalism to lead to more money.

Indeed, but, the profit motive prevented the timely release of the documents they have in they possesion. Are they still sitting on any docs?

They have reputedly released roughly 1% of what they received. I think that simply dumping the docs would have had less impact than the steady stream of new revelations, but certainly I could be mistaken...

I can think of two better questions:

1) Is it better to vet the documents, and remove personal information etc. where appropriate? If yes, then I'd rather they were released as they were prepared.

2) Would we still be discussing this if they had been dumped in one lot? This is maybe much more clever than you think. More importantly; I expect it's more likely these events will eventually seep into broader public consciousness if they don't come and go in a single news cycle.

They are releasing documentation based on Snowden's desired timeline, not based on some profit motive you are insinuating.

Why should we care about his desired timeline? The docs are not his property.

If he did not have an expectation that they would follow his timeline, he would be less likely to leak the docs to them, and possibly less likely to leak the docs at all. It's not like Snowden couldn't have just dumped all the docs on us if that was his intent.

So we have to sit around while The Guardian decides which docs are important..

And don't unwarrantedly put people in harms way, &c. Yes. It's called journalism. It's not perfect, but neither would an unfiltered dump have been. And it's far better than us not getting the docs at all, isn't it? Which is certainly another timeline Mr. Snowden could have chosen, at far greater personal convenience.

Ok, I see your point.

Probably not that much, to be honest. Most people here in the UK neither know nor care about him. Which is a real tragedy, but people just don't understand the technology side of it, and probably don't care anyway as they think it doesn't apply to them.

These stories have been popular with the Guardian's standard readership, but inside the UK at least, I doubt it has increased its market.

I'm thinking the Guardian picked up some U.S. readers, but have no evidence.

The Guardian have had a large focus to try to pick up US readership for a while (e.g. They launched CIF America).

The NSA coverage has probably helped them in that mission, in fact it is probably motivating a lot of their NSA coverage, the UK "switched off" over the issue almost day one.

Their switch to a .com domain, and expansion of US-focused coverage was well-timed to coincide with these revelations.

Considering how expensive this kind of reporting is, in terms of legal fees, travel expenses and journalist salaries, I wouldn't be suprised if they made a loss.

It's not the most advertiser-friendly story either.

I came here wondering whether this exact issue weighed on their decision. Big Headliner == Candidate for Person of the Year?

$6k easily.