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The Guardian is a foundation-owned national British newspaper known for its global reach and liberal editorial stance.
The Guardian was founded in 1821 as the Manchester Guardian (it was moved to London in 1964). In 1936, ownership of the paper was passed on to the Scott Trust, which has pledged to maintain the paper’s independence and liberal editorial tradition and to reinvest whatever profit it makes.
The Guardian is a national newspaper, and the majority of its online readers are outside the U.K. It is believed to have the fifth most-read English-language news site in the world.
The Guardian has a print circulation of about 215,000, far from the largest in Britain. Its web readership is much greater, however, with more than 60 million unique visitors, including 20 million in the U.S. The paper’s total monthly British readership was estimated via survey at 8.95 million in mid-2012, with more than half of that total coming online.
The Guardian launched an American edition of its website in 2007 (which was closed in 2009), and it has articulated an aim to become the “leading global liberal voice.” In March 2011, The Guardian announced plans for an expanded digital operation in the U.S., naming editor Janine Gibson as the head of the effort and later hiring blogger Glenn Greenwald. It also announced the launch of a digital Australian edition in 2013. In print, however, the paper announced it would stop its international editions as of October 2011 and cut other print supplements.
The Guardian is published under the Scott Trust by Guardian News and Media, which also publishes the London daily newspaper The Observer. It also owns the web economics network ContentNext Media and half of the business publisher Emap and classifed network Trader Media Group.
Guardian News and Media has lost money each of the past four years: It lost $66 million in 2008, while its parent company, Guardian Media Group, lost $162 million. It also lost money in 2009, £33 million in 2010, and about $50 million in 2011.
Based in part on those financial difficulties, the Guardian’s executives announced in June 2011 a “digital first” strategy aimed at doubling the company’s digital revenues within five years. As of 2012, 75% of the Guardian’s revenue was generated from print. In the strategy’s first year, the company lost $69 million, prompting plans of further cuts and restructuring.
In 2010, The Guardian, along with newspapers like The New York Times and Der Spiegel, produced reporting on the war in Afghanistan as a result of 92,000 documents related to the war being released from WikiLeaks. The Guardian collaborated with Wikileaks again in November 2010 for the coordinated release and reporting of secret U.S. Embassy cables. (It also gave its WikiLeaks-provided cables to The New York Times, which had fallen out of favor with WikiLeaks after an unflattering profile of the organization’s founder, Julian Assange.) In early 2011, The Guardian published a book chronicling its interactions with Assange and WikiLeaks.
Guardian.co.uk
The Guardian’s website, Guardian.co.uk, was founded in 1998 as the Guardian Unlimited, and the paper’s executives have expressed for several years a desire to move away from the paper’s print product and toward digital media. The paper formally moved to web-first publishing in 2006.
The Guardian formerly offered a paid subscription to an ad-free version of its website, but its executives have opposed online paywalls more recently. In 2010, it launched a membership program called Guardian Extra. The program, which offers live events, discounts, and other perks, initially cost members £25 a year; currently, however, the program is offering free trial memberships. The paper created a digital strategy director position in 2012 to head up its business strategies online.
The Guardian was the first British newspaper to open its content to developers through an API in 2009. The paper has also been active in crowdsourcing, asking readers to help provide information about G20 protests, MPs’ expenses, and Tony Blair’s tax affairs.
Its editor, Alan Rusbridger, has been an advocate of what he calls the “mutualization” of journalism or “open journalism” — an approach to news production that relies on a collaborative relationship between journalists and the public. In 2010, The Guardian put that idea to use when it gave a group of science bloggers direct access to its CMS and implemented a revenue-sharing arrangement with them. The next year, it experimented with opening up its list of upcoming stories to the public and launched an open community news platform called n0tice with ads and revenue sharing, later releasing an open API for it.
In 2013, it created a free mobile and tablet app that allowed users to send content directly to the paper’s content management system. It also launched a “citizens’ agenda”-driven initiative for 2012 U.S. election coverage in partnership with New York University, and began acting as a platform for British arts organizations and moving into journalism training that year as well.
In 2012, the Guardian held its first Open Weekend, opening its newsroom to the public and encouraging readers to become involved in its news process. As part of that weekend, it articulated its 10 principles of open journalism.
In late 2009, The Guardian launched a paid iPhone app that drew 100,000 downloads in the first two months. Its next iPhone app, launched in January 2011, had been downloaded 400,000 times by June 2011. In 2010, it launched a free iPad app, Guardian Eyewitness, which features digital images from the paper. (Rusbridger has also expressed a desire to “produce significant revenue” through paid content on the iPad.) The paper also launched an edition for Amazon’s Kindle in July 2011, and in late 2012 launched a responsive mobile website. The Guardian’s mobile website accounts for 10% of its overall digital traffic.
As of 2012, the paper draws about 600,000 comments to its website per month. The paper launched a Facebook social-news app in September 2011, drawing 8 million installations in its first six months and shifting much of its traffic from search to social. It shut down the app in December 2012, in part because of changes to Facebook’s News Feed that exposed fewer people to its content there.
In 2006, The Guardian began a group opinion blog with Guardian and Observer columnists called Comment Is Free (the name derives from a saying of C.P. Scott, a longtime Guardian editor). The paper launched a network of hyperlocal beat blogs in early 2010, shutting them down a year later. It has also experimented with offering a printable PDF newspaper with stories aggregated from its websites.
The Daily Voice, formerly known as Main Street Connect, is a network of hyperlocal news sites that operates on a franchise model. The company, founded by former community newspaper publisher Carll Tucker, was launched in early 2010 with The Daily Norwalk, a site covering Norwalk, Conn. It quickly expanded to several other sites in the…
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