Unlike the enfeebled Washington Post and LA Times, the Guardian isn’t pulling many punches on its front page. Granted it isn’t under the same jurisdiction as the two aforementioned institutions, and it also isn’t owned by a a cowardly tech billionaire.

America’s moment of reckoning has arrived. On Tuesday, the nation will hold a presidential election like none before, poised between the historic candidacy of a Black woman and a former president branded a fascist by his own former officials.

Their formal endorsementcame a couple of weeks ago:

It is hard to imagine a worse candidate for the American presidency in 2024 than Donald J Trump. His history of dishonesty, hypocrisy and greed makes him wholly unfit for the office. A second Trump term would erode the rule of law, diminish America’s global standing and deepen racial and cultural divides. Even if he loses, Mr Trump has shown that he will undermine the election process, with allies spreading unfounded conspiracy theories to delegitimise the results.

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Defeating Mr Trump protects democracy from oligarchy and dictatorship. There is too much at stake not to back Ms Harris for president.

A surprisingly (to me, perhaps it should not have been) good effort from a US based publication came from Teen Vogue’s Harris endorsement. They made the very valid point that even if you don’t like Harris' policies - specifically in their case the actions taken on the Israel/Gaza conflict - Trump would be so much worse on the same things, and furthermore make it hard to organise against it.

Donald Trump cannot win this election. Full stop.

Right now, we have the power to make sure that doesn’t happen.

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Autocrats thrive on overwhelming people. President Trump overwhelmed us every single day.

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It’s not enough to beat a fascist with razor-thin margins; ideally, we need to run up the margin of victory so high it becomes that much harder for Trump and his cronies to claim they represent the will of the American people.

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Right now, we have the power to stop Trump. Should he win, we may not have these tools at our disposal again. Trump is on the record telling conservative Christians he just needs them to vote this year and then they won’t have to vote again. “Four more years, it’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine, you won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians,” he said this summer, one of many comments that should have set off a weeks-long scandalous news cycle but got subsumed by, well, everything else. He has an army of election deniers ready to do his corrupt, anti-democratic bidding.

In being censored by their owners from making an endorsement, the Washington Post and LA Times appear to have lost a lot of their subscribers. Semafor reports, in an article wonderfully titled “The Washington Post sold Democracy. Now it needs a new line of business” that the WaPo lost at least 200,000 of them - a cost thought to represent a possible $20 million in revenue. The LA Times lost at least 18,000, with both figures potentially still growing.

This, in their view is at least in part down to many subscribers to newspapers doing so as part of an effort to support “capital-J journalism” rather than merely improved access to a specific product’s content.

Hundreds of thousands of Americans didn’t necessarily feel they needed the Post’s journalism or its service products, but they did want Journalism with a capital J, a force willing to take Trump on directly and to absorb his wrath when other institutions weren’t.

That feels right to me. Whenever I have subscribed to a newspaper it wasn’t usually for the content. There’s more than enough information of interest floating around the internet “for free” - free if you disregard the payment taken via the secretive harvesting of your personal data at least.

It was because I supported the process and the people that created that content; supported the effort to go out there, do the no doubt often grueling work that stands some chance of informing us about reality, and critically, to expose and challenge the powerful when they lie to or otherwise abuse us.

Not that this should be the point, but endorsing Harris certainly didn’t cost the Guardian much in terms of subscriber or direct revenue. Rather it apparently let to a big increase in donations - around $2 million - making it, according to the Press Gazette:

…one of the most successful subscription marketing messages in the history of online news.