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File:Frontpage.jpg
TypeDaily newspaper
FormatBerliner
Owner(s)Guardian Media Group
EditorAlan Rusbridger
Founded1821
Political alignmentCentre Left
Headquarters119 Farringdon Road, London
Websitewww.guardian.co.uk

The Guardian is a British newspaper owned by the Guardian Media Group. It is published Monday to Saturday in the Berliner format. Until 1959 it was called The Manchester Guardian, reflecting its provincial origins; the paper is still occasionally referred to by this name, especially in North America, although it has been based in London since 1964 (with printing facilities in both Manchester and London).

Editorial articles in The Guardian are are often in sympathy with left-of-centre politics. This is reflected in the paper's readership; according to a MORI poll taken in 2004, 44% of Guardian readers vote Labour and 37% vote Liberal Democrat.

Today The Guardian is the only British national newspaper to publish in full colour (though not in Northern Ireland); it was also the first newspaper in the UK to be printed on the Berliner size. In November 2005 The Guardian had a certified average daily circulation of 378,618 copies (November 2005), as compared to sales of 904,955 for the Daily Telegraph, 692,581 for The Times, and 261,193 for The Independent. The paper is sometimes known as "The Grauniad" (coined by Private Eye), as a result of frequent typographical errors for which it became infamous in the era before computer typesetting.

The Guardian Unlimited web site won the Best Newspaper category in the 2005 Webby Awards, beating the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal and Variety. It has been the winner for six years in a row of the British Newspaper Awards for Best Daily Newspaper on the World Wide Web (the pcsdotNet Award ). The site won an Eppy award from the US-based magazine Editor & Publisher in 2000 for the best-designed newspaper online service . The website is well-known and recognised for its commentary on sporting events, particularly its over-by-over cricket commentary.

Ownership

The Guardian is part of the Guardian Media Group of newspapers, radio stations, and new media including The Observer Sunday newspaper, the Manchester Evening News, and Guardian Unlimited, one of the most popular online news resources on the Internet. All the aforementioned are owned by The Scott Trust, a charitable foundation which aims to ensure the newspaper's editorial independence in perpetuity, maintaining its financial health to ensure it does not become vulnerable to take over by for-profit media groups, and the serious compromise of editorial independence that this often brings.

The Guardian's ownership by the Scott Trust is likely a factor in it being the only British national daily to conduct (since 2003) an annual social, ethical and environmental audit in which it examines, under the scrutiny of an independent external auditor, its own behaviour as a company.

The Guardian and its parent groups are a participant in Project Syndicate , established by George Soros, and intervened in 1995 to save the Mail & Guardian in South Africa , but Guardian Media Group sold the majority of its shares in the Mail & Guardian in 2002.

History

The Guardian's Newsroom visitor centre and archive (No 60), with an old sign with the name The Manchester Guardian

The Manchester Guardian was founded in Manchester in 1821 by a group of non-conformist businessmen headed by John Edward Taylor. The prospectus which announced the new publication proclaimed that "it will zealously enforce the principles of civil and religious Liberty … it will warmly advocate the cause of Reform; it will endeavour to assist in the diffusion of just principles of Political Economy; and to support, without reference to the party from which they emanate, all serviceable measures."

The first edition was published on May 5, 1821, at which time the Guardian was a weekly, published on Saturdays and costing 7d.; the stamp duty on newspapers (4d. per sheet) forced the price up so high that it was uneconomic to publish more frequently. When the stamp duty was cut in 1836 the Guardian added a Wednesday edition; with the abolition of the tax in 1855 it became a daily paper costing 2d.

Its most famous editor, C. P. Scott, made the Manchester Guardian into a nationally famous newspaper. He was editor for 57 years from 1872, and became its owner when he bought the paper from the estate of Taylor's son in 1907. Under Scott the paper's moderate editorial line became more radical, supporting Gladstone when the Liberals split in 1886, and opposing the Second Boer War against popular opinion.

Scott's friendship with Chaim Weizmann played a role in the Balfour Declaration, and in 1948 the Guardian was a supporter of the State of Israel. The story of the relationship between the Guardian and the zionist movement and Israel is told in Daphna Baram's book "Disenchantment: The Guardian and Israel" (Politico's, 2003. ISBN 1842751190).

In June 1936 ownership of the paper was transferred to the Scott Trust (named after the last owner, John Russell Scott, who was the first chairman of the Trust). This move ensured the paper's independence, and it was then noted for its eccentric style, its moralising and its detached attitude to its finances.

Traditionally affiliated with the centrist Liberal Party, and with a northern circulation base, the paper earned a national reputation and the respect of the left during the Spanish Civil War, when along with the now defunct News Chronicle it was the only UK source of news that was not tainted by support for the insurgent nationalists led by General Francisco Franco.

In 1952 the paper took the step of printing news on the front page, replacing the adverts that had hitherto filled that space. The editor A.P. Wadsworth wrote, "it is not a thing I like myself, but it seems to be accepted by all the newspaper pundits that it is preferable to be in fashion".

The Guardian's offices in London

In 1959 the paper dropped "Manchester" from its title, becoming simply The Guardian, and in 1964 it moved to London, losing some of its regional agenda but continuing to be heavily subsidised by sales of the less intellectual but much more profitable Manchester Evening News. The financial position remained extremely poor into the 1970s; at one time it was in merger talks with The Times. The paper consolidated its left-wing stance during the 1970s and 1980s but was both shocked and revitalised by the launch of The Independent in 1986 which competed for similar readers and provoked the entire broadsheet industry into a fight for circulation.

In 1988 The Guardian had a significant redesign; as well as improving the quality of its printers ink, it also changed its masthead to its soon-familiar (but no-longer used as of 2005) juxtaposition of an italic Garamond "The", with a bold News Gothic "Guardian".

In 1992 it relaunched its features section as G2, a tabloid-format supplement. This innovation was widely copied by the other "quality" broadsheets, and ultimately led to the rise of "compact" papers and The Guardian's move to the Berliner format. In 1993 the paper declined to participate in the broadsheet 'price war' started by Rupert Murdoch's The Times. In June 1993, The Guardian bought The Observer from Lonrho, thus gaining a serious Sunday newspaper partner with similar political views.

In 1995, both the Granada Television programme World In Action and The Guardian were sued for libel by the then cabinet minister Jonathan Aitken, for their allegation that the Saudi Prince Mohammed bin Fahd had paid for Aitken and his wife to stay at the Hôtel Ritz in Paris, which would have amounted to accepting a bribe on Aitken's part. Aitken publicly stated he would fight with "the simple sword of truth and the trusty shield of British fair play". The court case proceeded, and in 1997 The Guardian produced evidence that Aitken's claim of his wife paying for the hotel stay was untrue. In 1999, Aitken was jailed for perjury and perverting the course of justice.

During the Afghanistan and Iraq wars The Guardian attracted a significant proportion of anti-war readers as one of the mass-media media outlets most critical of UK and USA military initiatives. The newspaper also gained readers in the United States where there were few "anti-war" rivals.

The Guardian's offices in London

Its international weekly edition is now titled The Guardian Weekly, though it retained the title Manchester Guardian Weekly for some years after the home edition had moved to London. It includes sections from a number of other internationally significant newspapers of a somewhat left-of-centre inclination, including Le Monde. In 2004, The Guardian introduced an online digital version of its print edition, allowing readers to download pages from the last 14 issues as PDF files.

In August 2004, for the US presidential election, the daily G2 supplement, edited by Ian Katz, launched an experimental letter-writing campaign in Clark County, Ohio, a small county in a swing state. Katz bought a voter list from the county for $25 and asked people to write to those on the list undecided in the election. The point of this venture was for the writers to give Clark County voters a taste of international opinion, without endorsing any candidates. This caused something of a backlash, and on 21 October, 2004, the paper retired the campaign.

Following the 7 July 2005 London bombings, The Guardian published an article on its comment pages by Dilpazier Aslam, a 27-year-old British Muslim journalism trainee from Yorkshire. Aslam was a member of Hizb ut-Tahrir, an Islamist group, and had published a number of articles on their website. According to the paper, it did not know that Aslam was a member of Hizb ut-Tahrir when he applied to become a trainee, though several staff members were informed of this once he started at the paper. The Home Office has claimed the group's "ultimate aim is the establishment of an Islamic state (Caliphate), according to Hizb ut-Tahrir via non-violent means". The Guardian asked Aslam to resign his membership of the group, and – when he did not do so – terminated his employment.

In 2005 The Guardian moved to the Berliner paper format and changed the design of its masthead.

Moving to the Berliner paper format

File:GuardianLastBroadsheet20050910.jpg
The last broadsheet edition of The Guardian, along with a preview of the Berliner format and its competitor The Independent, all from 2005-09-10. A sheet of A4 paper is shown for scale.

In 2004, The Guardian announced plans to change to a "Berliner" or "midi" format similar to that used by Le Monde in France and some other European papers; at 470×315 mm, this is slightly larger than a traditional tabloid. Planned for the autumn of 2005, this change was either a response to, or has the same cause as, the moves by The Times and The Independent to start publishing in tabloid (or "compact") format. On Thursday 1 September 2005 The Guardian announced that it would launch the new format on Monday 12 September. Sister Sunday newspaper The Observer went over to the same format on 8 January 2006.

The advantage that The Guardian saw in the Berliner format was that though it is only a little wider than a tabloid, and is thus equally easy to read on public transport, its greater height gives more flexibility in page design. The new presses mean that printing can go right across the 'gutter', the strip down the middle of the centre page, allowing the paper to print striking double page pictures. The new presses also made the paper the first UK national able to print in full colour on every page.

The format switch was accompanied by a comprehensive redesign of the paper's look. On Friday 9 September 2005 the newspaper unveiled its new look front page , which débuted on Monday 12 September 2005. Designed by Mark Porter, the new look includes a new masthead for the newspaper, its first since 1988. The typeface is called Guardian Egyptian. In the new design, no other typeface is used anywhere in the paper - all stylistic variations are based on various forms of Guardian Egyptian.

The switch cost Guardian Newspapers £80 million and involved setting up new printing presses in east London and Manchester. This was because prior to the Guardian's move, no printing presses in the UK could produce newspapers in the Berliner format. There were additional complications as one of the Guardian's presses was part-owned by groups responsible for The Daily Telegraph and The Daily Express, and it was contracted to use the plant until 2009. Another press was shared with the Guardian Media Group's north western local tabloid papers, which did not wish to switch to the Berliner format.

The investment was rewarded with a circulation rise. In December 2005, the average daily sale stood at 380,693, nearly 6% higher than the figure for December 2004.

Supplements and features

File:TheGuardian20051001.jpg
The Saturday edition of The Guardian includes some sections of varying sizes.

On each weekday The Guardian comes with the G2 supplement containing feature articles, columns, television and radio listings and the quick crossword. Since the change to the Berliner format, there is a separate daily Sport section. Other regular supplements during the week include:

Monday
MediaGuardian, Office Hours
Tuesday
EducationGuardian
Wednesday
SocietyGuardian (covers the British public sector and related issues)
Thursday
TechnologyGuardian
Friday
Film & Music
Saturday
The Guide (a weekly listings magazine), Weekend (the colour supplement), Review (covers literature), Money, Work, Rise (covering careers for new graduates), Travel, Family

Though the main news section was in the large broadsheet format, the supplements were all in the half-sized tabloid format, with the exception of the glossy Weekend section which was a 290×245mm magazine and The Guide which was in a small 225×145mm format.

With the change of the main section to the Berliner format, the specialist sections are now printed as Berliner, as is a now-daily Sports section, but G2 has moved to a "magazine-sized" demi-Berliner format. A Thursday Technology section and daily science coverage in the news section replaced Life and Online. Weekend and The Guide are still in the same small formats as before the change.

Regular columns

Online media

Main article: Guardian Unlimited

The Guardian publishes all of its news online, with free access both to current news and an archive of three million stories. A third of the site's hits are for items over a month old. The website also offers PDF editions of the newspaper for a monthly subscription fee. Free and unrestricted access has been cited as one of factors in the site's popularity.

The Guardian also has a number of talkboards that are noted for their mix of political disussion and whimsy. They are spoofed in the Guardian's own regular humorous Chatroom column in G2. The spoof column purports to be excerpts from a chatroom on permachat.co.uk, a real URL which points to The Guardian's talkboards.

The Guardian has also launched a dating website, Soulmates, and is experimenting with new media, offering a free twelve part weekly Podcast series by Ricky Gervais. In January 2006 Gervais' show topped the iTunes podcast chart having been downloaded by two million listeners worldwide, and is scheduled to be listed in the 2007 Guinness Book of Records as the most downloaded Podcast.

The Guardian in the popular imagination

The affectionate name the Grauniad for the paper originated with the satirical magazine Private Eye; it came about because, in the past, it was noted for frequent text mangling, technical typesetting failures and typographical errors, including once misspelling its own name as "The Gaurdian" in the 1970s. Although such errors are now less frequent than they used to be, the 'Corrections and clarifications' column can still often provide some amusement. There were even a number of errors in the first issue, perhaps the most notable being a notification that there would soon be some goods sold at acton, instead of auction.

Until the foundation of the Independent, the Guardian was the only serious national daily newspaper in Britain that was not clearly conservative in its political affiliation. The term "Guardian reader" is therefore often used pejoratively by those who do not agree with the paper or self-deprecatingly by those who do. The stereotype of a Guardian reader is a person with leftist or liberal politics rooted in the 1960s, working in the public sector, regularly eating lentils and muesli, wearing sandals and believing in alternative medicine and natural medicine as evidenced by Labour MP Kevin Hughes' largely rhetorical question in the House of Commons on November 19, 2001:

"Does my right hon. Friend find it bizarre — as I do — that the yoghurt- and muesli-eating, Guardian-reading fraternity are only too happy to protect the human rights of people engaged in terrorist acts, but never once do they talk about the human rights of those who are affected by them?"

Like most stereotypes, this one is both partly inaccurate and outdated. For instance, the Guardian's science coverage is now extensive and although its Weekend supplement features a column by Emma Mitchell, a natural health therapist, and G2 was until the relaunch home to Edzard Ernst's weekly column on complementary medicine (Ernst is professor of complementary medicine at the Peninsula medical school, ), the paper now carries the Bad Science column by Ben Goldacre and a quizzical column in G2 called The Sceptic , which looks at the evidence for popular treatments and remedies.

The stereotype, however, is a persistent feature of British political discourse. Even doctors perpetuate it by using the acronym GROLIES (Guardian Reader Of Low Intelligence in Ethnic Skirt) on patient notes.

The Guardian has a tradition of spoof articles on April Fool's Day, sometimes contributed by regular advertisers such as BMW. The most elaborate of these was a travel supplement on San Serriffe.

References in fiction

This section needs expansion. You can help by making an edit requestadding to it .
  • The 1984 Christmas special of Yes, Minister shows a number of newspapers tipping Jim Hacker as the next Prime Minister. The Guardian is among them, but its name is spelt The Gaurdian. In Episode 6 a group of pro-Badger protesters tell Jim Hacker that the Guardian told them the area they are fighting to save has been inhabitated by Badgers for centuries. In fact Hacker points out jokingly the "bodgers" have lived there for centuries, clearly satirising the Guardian's reputation of spelling.
  • In the Young Ones episode "Boring," Rick eagerly notes that The Guardian has an article on how to get an increased student grant. Unfortunately the paper has totally mangled the spelling of a key part of it, leaving Rick with no idea how to get the increased grant. Worse still, the misspelling happens to sound the same as a Satanic chant, so that when Neil repeats what Rick read out loud he accidentally summons a demon who tries to kill everyone there.

Literary patronage

The Guardian is the sponsor of two major literary awards: The Guardian First Book Award, established in 1999 as a successor to the Guardian Fiction Award which had run since 1965, and the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize, founded in 1967. In recent years it has also sponsored the Hay Festival in Hay-on-Wye.

Editors

Notable regular contributors (past and present)

The Newsroom archive

The Guardian and its sister newspaper The Observer also provide The Newsroom, a visitor centre in London. It contains their archives, including bound copies of old editions, a photographic library and other items such as diaries, letters and notebooks. This material may be consulted by members of the public. The Newsroom also mounts temporary exhibitions and runs an educational programme for schools. There is also an extensive Manchester Guardian archive at the University of Manchester's John Rylands Library and there is a collaboration programme between the two archives. The British Library also has a large archive of the Manchester Guardian, available in online, hard copy, microform, and CD-ROM in their British Library Newspapers collection.

References

  1. MORI, 2005-03-09. "Voting Intention by Newspaper Readership"
  2. Audit Bureau of Circulations Ltd
  3. The Webby Awards, 2005. "9th Annual Webby Awards nominations and winners."
  4. Eppy Awards, 2000. "Winners."
  5. Guardian Newspapers Ltd & Scott Trust, 2005. "Social, ethical and environmental audit, 2005."
  6. Schoolnet, n.d. "Manchester Guardian."
  7. Jonathan Aitkin, 1995. "The simple sword of truth." The Guardian.
  8. Luke Harding and David Pallister, 1997 "He lied and lied and lied" The Guardian.
  9. BBC News, 1999. "Aitken pleads guilty to perjury."
  10. Dilpazier Aslam, 2005-07-13. "We rock the boat." The Guardian.
  11. Media Guardian, 2005-07-22. "Background: the Guardian and Dilpazier Aslam." The Guardian.
  12. Steve Busfield, 2005-07-22. "Dilpazier Aslam leaves Guardian." The Guardian.
  13. Claire Cozens, 2005-09-01. "New-look Guardian launches on September 12." The Guardian.
  14. Claire Cozens, 2006-01-13. "Telegraph sales hit all-time low." The Guardian.
  15. Emily Bell, 2005-10-08. "Editor's Week." The Guardian.
  16. Jason Deans, 2005-12-08. "Gervais to host Radio 2 Christmas show." The Guardian.
  17. Media Guardian "Comedy stars and radio DJs top the download charts." The Guardian.
  18. John Plunkett, 2006-02-06. "." The Guardian.
  19. Hansard 374:54 2001-11-19.
  20. Sarah Boseley, 2003-09-26 "The alternative professor." The Guardian.
  21. BBC News, 2003-08-18. "Doctor slang is a dying art."

External links

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