The Guardian is a British newspaper owned by the Guardian Media Group. It is a serious broadsheet newspaper with relatively left wing politics. Until 1959 it was called The Manchester Guardian, and the paper is still sometimes referred to by this name, especially in North America. The Guardian has a daily circulation of around 400,000 (2002), compared to 620,000 for The Times, 920,000 for the Daily Telegraph and 230,000 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, although these are now less common.

Contents

1 Ownership 2 History 3 Supplements 4 The Guardian in the popular imagination 5 Operation Clark County 6 Editors 7 Current columnists 8 Notable regular contributors (past and present) 9 See also 10 External links 11 Other publications of the same name

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 the 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.

The Guardian and its parent groups are a participant in Project Syndicate [1] http://www.project-syndicate.org/ , established by George Soros, and have recently intervened to save the Mail & Guardian in South Africa [2] http://www.mg.co.za/ , but Guardian Media Group later sold the shares of the Mail & Guardian it held.

History

The Manchester Guardian was founded in Manchester in 1821 by a group of non-conformist businessmen headed by John Edward Taylor. The first edition was published on May 5, 1821, and it became a daily paper in 1855.

Its most famous editor, C. P. Scott made the Manchester Guardian into a noted newspaper. He was editor for 57 years from 1872, buying the paper from the estate of Taylor's son in 1907.

In June 1936, to avoid death duty, ownership of the paper was passed to the Scott Trust (named after the last owner, John Russell Scott, who was the first chairman of the Trust). The paper 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 1959 the paper dropped "Manchester" from its title, becoming simply The Guardian, and 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. The paper declined to participate in the broadsheet 'price war' started by Rupert Murdoch's The Times in 1993.

In 1995, both the Granada Television program 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 Ritz hotel in Paris, which would have amounted to accepting a bribe on Aitken's part. Aitken publically stated he would fight with "the simple sword of truth and the trusty shield of British fair play" [3] http://www.guardian.co.uk/aitken/Story/0,2763,208516,00.html . 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. [4] http://www.guardian.co.uk/aitken/Story/0,2763,208503,00.html In 1999, Aitken was jailed for perjury and perverting the course of justice. [5] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/258070.stm

During the Afghanistan and Iraq wars The Guardian picked up additional anti-war readers as one of the few anti-war newspapers. The newspaper also gained anti-war readers in the United States where there were few anti-war rivals.

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 that day's issue as a PDF file.

The Guardian has recently 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. Expected to take place by the end of 2005 (some have suggested Monday 5th September 2005 as the starting date), this change is 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.

Supplements

On a weekday The Guardian comes with the G2 supplement containing feature articles, columns, television and radio listings and the quick crossword. Other supplements are included during the week are:

• Monday - Media, Sport
• Tuesday - Education
• Wednesday - Society (covers the British public sector and related issues.)
• Thursday - Life (covers science.), Online
• Friday - Friday Review (covers music and film.)
• Saturday - The Guide (a weekly listings magazine), Weekend (the colour supplement ), Saturday Review (covers literature), Jobs and Money, Travel, Sport

The Guardian in the popular imagination

The affectionate name the Grauniad for the paper 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 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 atction, instead of auction.

Until the foundation of the Independent, the Guardian was the only serious national daily newspaper in England that was not clearly conservative in its political affiliation. The term "Guardian reader" is therefore often used pejoratively by right-wingers. The reactionary 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?" [6] http://www.publications.parliament.uk/cgi-bin/ukparl_hl?DB=ukparl&STEMMER=en&WOR
DS=guardian+yoghurt+muesli+read+fratern+&COLOUR=Red&STYLE=s&URL=/pa/cm200102/cmh
ansrd/vo011119/debtext/11119-08.htm#11119-08_spnew3

Like most stereotypes, this one is both inaccurate and outdated (for example, the Guardians science coverage is extensive and is characterised by a contempt for alternative medicine), but it is a persistent feature of English political discourse.

Even Doctors perpetuate the stereotype by using the acronym GROLIES on patient notes. The acronym expands to Guardian Reader Of Low Intelligence in Ethnic Skirt. [7] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/3159813.stm

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.

Operation Clark County

In August 2004, for the US presidential election, the editor of the supplement "G2", Ian Katz, thought it would be an interesting idea to do a letter-writing campaign in Clark County, Ohio as this was a small county in a swing state. He bought a voter list from the county for $25 and asked people to write to those on the list undecided in the election. This caused something of a backlash with letters on both sides of the argument. Much ill-informed rhetoric was exchanged. However, on the 21st October, the Guardian decided to retire the campaign. Bush ended up winning 51 percent of the Clark County vote.

After the election, Republican and Democrat leaders in the county agreed that the Guardian's campaign had not influenced the outcome of the election but suggested that it may have contributed to the high turnout (76.7%).

Editors

• Charles Prestwich Scott (1872-1929)
• Ted Scott (1929-1932)
• William Percival Crozier (1932-1944)
• Alfred Powell Wadsworth (1944-1956)
• Alastair Hetherington (1956-1975)
• Peter Preston (1975-1995)
• Alan Rusbridger (1995- )

Current columnists

• David Aaronovitch
• Ian Black
• Alexander Chancellor
• Larry Elliott
• Jonathan Freedland
• Timothy Garton Ash
• Roy Hattersley
• Isabel Hilton
• Simon Hoggart
• Will Hutton
• Victor Keegan
• Martin Kettle
• Mark Lawson
• Ian Mayes
• David McKie
• George Monbiot
• John O'Farrell
• Peter Preston
• Simon Tisdall
• Polly Toynbee
• Xinran
• Gary Younge

Notable regular contributors (past and present)

• Araucaria
• John Arlott
• David Austin
• Steve Bell
• Julian Borger
• Julie Burchill
• Duncan Campbell
• Neville Cardus
• Alastair Cooke
• G. D. H. Cole
• Harold Evans
• Paul Foot
• Michael Frayn
• Ben Hammersley
• Jeremy Hardy
• Max Hastings
• David Hencke
• L. T. Hobhouse
• J. A. Hobson
• David Low
• C. E. Montague
• Malcolm Muggeridge
• James Naughtie
• Richard Norton-Taylor
• Melanie Phillips
• John Pilger
• Arthur Ransome
• Brian Redhead
• Jon Ronson
• Martin Rowson
• Posy Simmonds
• Mark Steel
• Mary Stott
• Garry Trudeau
• Jill Tweedie
• Brian Whitaker
• Martin Woollacott
• Hugo Young

See also

• Notes & Queries

External links

• Guardian Front Page RSS feed http://www.guardian.co.uk/rssfeed/0,,1,00.xml (in XML; use a news aggregator)
• Guardian Unlimited http://www.guardian.co.uk/
• Founding of the Manchester Guardian http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/PRguardian.htm
• Information about The Guardian Archive http://rylibweb.man.ac.uk/data2/spcoll/guardian/
• Media Guardian: How the broadsheets brightened up http://media.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,4777964-105414,00.html
• Featured G2 article on Wikipedia, Tuesday 26th October 2004 http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/news/0,12597,1335892,00.html

Other publications of the same name

The Guardian was also the title of

1. a short-lived publication of 1713, founded by Richard Steele and featuring contributions by his collaborator Joseph Addison.
2. a weekly Anglican newspaper founded in 1846 by Richard William Church and others, which ran until 1951.