Case study example –The Guardian



Case study example –The Guardian

History

The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian (founded 1821), is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format. Currently edited by Alan Rusbridger, it has grown from a nineteenth century local paper to a national paper associated with a complex organisational structure and international multimedia presence with sister papers The Observer (British Sunday paper) and The Guardian Weekly, as well as a large web presence.

The Guardian in paper form had a certified average daily circulation of 232,566 in September 2011, behind The Daily Telegraph and The Times, but ahead of The Independent According to its editor, The Guardian has the second largest online readership of any English-language newspaper in the world, after the New York Times.

Founded in 1821 by John Edward Taylor in Manchester, The Guardian replaced the radical Manchester Observer which championed the Peterloo protesters. The paper identifies with centre-left liberalism and its readership is generally on the mainstream left of British political opinion. The paper is also influential in design and publishing arena, sponsoring many awards in these areas.

The Guardian has changed format and design over the years moving from broadsheet to Berliner, and has become an international media organisation with affiliations to other national papers with similar aims. The Guardian Weekly, which circulates worldwide, contains articles from The Guardian and its sister Sunday paper The Observer, as well as reports, features and book reviews from The Washington Post and articles translated from Le Monde. Other projects include GuardianFilm, the current editorial director of which is Maggie O'Kane.

Global market?

Guardian America

In 2007, the paper launched a website Guardian America, an attempt to capitalise on its large online readership in the United States, which at the time stood at more than 5.9m. The company hired former American Prospect editor, New York magazine columnist and New York Review of Books writer Michael Tomasky to head up the project and hire a staff of American reporters and web editors. The site featured Guardian news relevant to an American audience, coverage of US news and the Middle East, for example.

Tomasky stepped down from his position as Guardian American editor in February 2009, ceding editing and planning duties to other US and London staff. He retained his position as a columnist and blogger, taking the title editor-at-large.

In October 2009, the company abandoned the Guardian America homepage, instead directing users to a US news index page on the main website. The next month, the company laid off six American employees, including a reporter, a multimedia producer and four web editors. The move came as Guardian News and Media opted to reconsider its US strategy amid a massive effort to cut costs across the company.

Guardian choice poses question for digital newspaper print

The Guardian pulls plug on overseas printing preferring digital issues, throwing open the concept of remote printing for international editions

THE GUARDIAN IS TO CEASE printing, but only its overseas editions - at least for the moment.

The company announced on Friday last week that as of October 1, editions printed in Frankfurt, Malta, New York, Madrid and Cyprus would cease publication. In all this amounts to 19,000 copies a day of the Guardian and 17,000 copies of The Observer, only a fraction of their UK sale.

The company explains that the cost of printing and distribution abroad is high and the overseas titles attract little advertising, the company says, which will result in a small saving to the newspaper. Readers will be forced to turn to the publisher’s website to follow columnists and the Guardian’s news agenda. This already attracts 45 million users a month and has helped establish the paper as an international title. Money saved from the end of print decision will be directed towards developments of the website.

THE MOVE FALLS IN LINE WITH THE ‘digital first’ strategy that the paper announced last month. Its future lies more in publishing to the internet rather than on paper, with some commentators recommending that the paper concentrates its focus on comment and feature articles in magazine format, rather than try to publish every day with news at the forefront as this can be delivered by digital means. Its research has shown that half its readers consume the paper in the evening, consequently are not buying it for breaking news coverage. This is already resulting in changes to daily supplements, aided also by a migration or recruitment advertising away from newsprint to the internet.

The publisher is planning subscription based editions for Kindle and iPad readers that will help “de;liver growth among our UK and international audiences” according to GNM commercial director Adam Freeman. A tentative October launch for the tablet editions is expected, which would tie in with the decision to cease overseas printing.

While the loss of the Guardian contracts will have little impact on the individual print plants producing the title, a mixture of litho and digital production, the move does dent expectations that an international network of plants equipped with digital presses will exist to print international editions of newspapers in future.

KODAK HAS VERSAMARK INKJET TECHNOLOGY established at Miller Group plants in Malta and Cyprus to print on the spot rather than importing issues and believes that island locations are perfect for remote digital printing. Miller is now investing in digital technology in Tenerife in The Canary Islands. There is also a Versamark at sister company Newsfax, close to the Olympic site in east London ready to print on demand editions of papers for the international community expected to descend on Stratford next year. This is the second model for digital production of newspapers, one that Océ has been espousing and one which is central to its partnership with Manroland. Other newspapers with a strong internet readership will examine what happens with the Guardian as they consider a future strategy.

The Guardian Weekly, a print digest from the Guardian, Observer, Washington Post and Le Monde, will continue and may expand as a result.

Ownership

The Guardian is part of the GMG Guardian Media Group of newspapers, radio stations, print media including The Observer Sunday newspaper, The Guardian Weekly international newspaper, and new media—Guardian Abroad website, and guardian.co.uk. All the aforementioned were owned by The Scott Trust, a charitable foundation existing between 1936 and 2008, which aimed to ensure the paper's editorial independence in perpetuity, maintaining its financial health to ensure it did not become vulnerable to take overs by for-profit media groups. At the beginning of October 2008, the Scott Trusts assets were transferred to a new limited company, The Scott Trust Limited, with the intention being that the original trust would be wound up. Dame Liz Forgan, chair of the Scott Trust, reassured staff that the purposes of the new company remained as under the previous arrangements.

The Guardian has been consistently loss-making. The National Newspaper division of GMG, which also includes The Observer, reported operating losses of £49.9m in 2006, up from £18.6m in 2005. The paper is therefore heavily dependent on cross-subsidisation from profitable companies within the group, including Auto Trader .

The Guardian's ownership by the Scott Trust is a likely 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. It is also the only British daily national newspaper to employ an internal ombudsman (called the "readers' editor") to handle complaints and corrections.

The Guardian and its parent groups participate 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.

The continual losses made from the National Newspaper division of the Guardian Media Group, caused the group to dispose of its Regional Media division by selling titles to competitor Trinity Mirror in March 2010. This included the flagship Manchester Evening News, and severed the historic link between that paper and The Guardian. The sale was in order to safeguard the future of The Guardian Newspaper as is the intended purpose of the Scott Trust.

In June 2011 Guardian News and Media revealed increased annual losses of £33m and announced that it was looking to focus on its online edition for news coverage, leaving a physical newspaper that was to contain more comment and features. It was also speculated that the Guardian may become the first British national daily paper to go solely online.

Stance and editorial opinion – reflecting that of the readers?

Founded by textile traders and merchants, The Guardian had a reputation as "an organ of the middle class", or in the words of C.P. Scott's son Ted "a paper that will remain bourgeois to the last". "I write for the Guardian," said Sir Max Hastings in 2005, "because it is read by the new establishment", reflecting the paper's then growing influence.

The paper's readership is generally on the mainstream left of British political opinion: a MORI poll taken between April and June 2000 showed that 80% of Guardian readers were Labour Party voters; according to another MORI poll taken in 2005, 48% of Guardian readers were Labour voters and 34% Liberal Democrat voters. The newspaper's reputation as a platform for liberal and left-wing opinions has led to the use of the epithet "Guardian reader" as a label for people holding such views.

Guardian features editor Ian Katz stated in 2004 that "...  it is no secret we are a centre-left newspaper ...". In 2008, Guardian columnist Jackie Ashley said that editorial contributors were a mix of "right-of-centre libertarians, greens, Blairites, Brownites, Labourite but less enthusiastic Brownites, etc" and that the newspaper was "clearly left of centre and vaguely progressive". She also said that "you can be absolutely certain that come the next general election, The Guardian's stance will not be dictated by the editor, still less any foreign proprietor (it helps that there isn't one) but will be the result of vigorous debate within the paper." The paper's comment and opinion pages, though often written by centre-left academics and writers like Polly Toynbee, have allowed some space for right-of-centre voices such as Simon Jenkins, Max Hastings and Michael Gove.

In the run-up to the 2010 general election, following a meeting of the editorial staff, the paper declared its support for the Liberal Democrats, in particular due to the party's stance on electoral reform. The paper suggested tactical voting to prevent a Conservative victory, given Britain's first-past-the-post electoral system.

Assistant Editor Michael White, in discussing media self-censorship in March 2011, says, "I have always sensed liberal, middle class ill-ease in going after stories about immigration, legal or otherwise, about welfare fraud or the less attractive tribal habits of the working class, which is more easily ignored altogether. Toffs, including royal ones, Christians, especially popes, governments of Israel, and US Republicans are more straightforward targets."

Accusations of bias in coverage of Israel

Despite its early support for the Zionist movement, in recent decades The Guardian has been accused of exaggerating criticism of Israeli government policy. In December 2003 columnist Julie Burchill cited "striking bias against the state of Israel" as one of the reasons she left the paper for The Times. A leaked report from the European Monitoring Centre on Racism cited The Economist's claim that for "many British Jews," the British media's reporting on Israel "is spiced with a tone of animosity, 'as to smell of anti-Semitism'... This is above all the case with the Guardian and The Independent". Greville Janner, former president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, has accused The Guardian of being "viciously and notoriously anti-Israel"

Responding to these accusations, a Guardian editorial in 2002 condemned anti-Semitism and defended the paper's right to criticise the policies and actions of the Israeli government, arguing that those who view such criticism as inherently anti-Jewish are mistaken. Harriet Sherwood, The Guardian's foreign editor, has also denied The Guardian has an anti-Israel bias, saying that the paper aims to cover all viewpoints in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Regular content and features – what the readership wants

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 are shown below.

Before the redesign in 2005, the main news section was in the large broadsheet format, but the supplements were all in the half-sized tabloid format, with the exception of the glossy Weekend section which was a 290×245 mm magazine and The Guide which was in a small 225×145 mm 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.

On Monday to Thursday, the supplements carry substantial quantities of recruitment advertising as well as editorial on their specialised topics.

G2

The following sections are in G2 every day from Monday to Friday: Arts, TV and Radio, Puzzles.

Monday

Sport:

• Clogger, a humorous look at the weekend's football. This includes an ever-changing list of sub-features such as:

o Jobs Guus Hiddink could do

o Total earnings of Fabio Capello

• Screen Break, by Martin Kelner: analysis of TV sports coverage

• What's rocking sport, where sportspeople select their favourite music

In G2:

• Charlie Brooker's column

• Ask Hadley: fashion advice from Hadley Freeman

MediaGuardian:

• ABC circulation figures (every month)

• Media Monkey: gossip from the media sector

Tuesday

EducationGuardian:

• Multiple choice: poses the same question to three different people (e.g. a teacher, a parent and a pupil)

Wednesday

In G2:

• Marcel Berlins' column

• The digested read, by John Crace

• Notes & Queries

SocietyGuardian (covers the British public sector and related issues)

• Eco Soundings: environmental news

Thursday

In G2:

• Private Lives

Formerly TechnologyGuardian (print version demised from 17 December 2009)[92]

• The "Free Our Data" campaign

Friday

In G2:

• Lost in showbiz

• Women

• Chess, poker and bridge

Film & Music

Saturday

The Guide (a weekly listings magazine)

• All Ears

Weekend (the colour supplement)

• One Million Tiny Plays About Britain

• "This Column Will Change Your Life" by Oliver Burkeman

• Food

o The New Vegetarian

Review (covers literature)

Money

Work including Graduate

Travel

Family

So who reads The Guardian exactly?

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|Newsstand price | |

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|Monday - Friday £1.00, Saturday £1.90 | |

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|Circulation |

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Circulation refers to the number of sold, reduced price and free copies of a title distributed on an average day over the stated time period.

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|29 Aug 11 - 02 Oct 11: 232,566 (Source: ABC) |Access the ABC summary report |

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|Readership |

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Readership refers to the number of people reading a title on an average day over the stated time period.

Jan 11 - Jun 11: 1,198,000 (Source: NRS) 

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|Demographic Profile |

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|Source: NRS Jan 11 - Jun 11 |Readership |Cover % |Profile % |

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|All Adults |1198 |2.4 |100 |

|Men |687 |2.8 |57 |

|Women |511 |2.0 |43 |

|Age | | | |

|15-24 |210 |2.7 |18 |

|25-34 |200 |2.5 |17 |

|35-44 |193 |2.3 |16 |

|45-54 |223 |2.6 |19 |

|55-64 |172 |2.4 |14 |

|65+ |200 |2.0 |17 |

|Social Class | | | |

|AB Adults |738 |5.6 |62 |

|ABC1 Adults |1049 |3.8 |88 |

|ABC1C2 Adults |1113 |2.9 |93 |

|C1 Adults |312 |2.2 |26 |

|C2 Adults |64 |0.6 |5 |

|DE Adults |85 |0.7 |7 |

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|AB Men |403 |5.9 |34 |

|ABC1 Men |601 |4.5 |50 |

|ABC1C2 Men |630 |3.3 |53 |

|C1 Men |198 |3.0 |17 |

|C2 Men |29 |0.5 |2 |

|DE Men |57 |1.1 |5 |

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|AB Women |335 |5.2 |28 |

|ABC1 Women |448 |3.2 |37 |

|ABC1C2 Women |483 |2.5 |40 |

|C1 Women |113 |1.5 |9 |

|C2 Women |35 |0.7 |3 |

|DE Women |28 |0.4 |2 |

|ITV Region | | | |

|Anglia |63 |1.6 |5 |

|Border |13 |2.6 |1 |

|London |422 |4.2 |35 |

|Central |140 |1.8 |12 |

|Wales & West |82 |1.8 |7 |

|Grampian |12 |1.2 |1 |

|Yorkshire |70 |1.3 |6 |

|West Country |37 |2.4 |3 |

|Meridian |118 |2.4 |10 |

|Granada |146 |2.6 |12 |

|Tyne Tees |52 |2.3 |4 |

|Central Scotland |44 |1.4 |4 |

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Technology – Print/digital/distribution

Circulation and format

The Guardian had a certified average daily circulation of 358,844 copies in January 2009– a drop of 5.17% on January 2008, as compared to sales of 842,912 for The Daily Telegraph, 617,483 for The Times, and 215,504 for The Independent.

Moving to the Berliner paper format

The Guardian is printed in full colour, and was the first newspaper in the UK to use the Berliner format for its main section, with producing sections and supplements in a range of page sizes including tabloid, approximately A4, and pocket-size (approximately A5).

In 2004, The Guardian announced plans to change to a "Berliner" or "midi" format similar to that used by Die Tageszeitung in Germany, Le Monde in France and many other European papers; at 470×315 mm, this is slightly larger than a traditional tabloid. Planned for the autumn of 2005, this change followed the moves by The Independent and The Times 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 2005. 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. A typeface family called Guardian Egyptian, designed by Paul Barnes and Christian Schwartz, was created for 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 Britain could produce newspapers in the Berliner format. There were additional complications as one of the paper's presses was part-owned by Telegraph Newspapers and Express Newspapers, and it was contracted to use the plant until 2009. Another press was shared with the Guardian Media Group's north western tabloid local papers, which did not wish to switch to the Berliner format.

New technologies - Online and digital media

The Guardian and its Sunday sibling, The Observer publish all their 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 a free printable A4 format PDF 24-hour newspaper, G24– made up of the top stories– and, for a monthly subscription, the complete newspaper in PDF format. As of January 2011[update] it is the second most popular UK newspaper website, behind the Daily Mail's Mail Online, with 39 million unique browsers per month to the Mail's 53.9m, and in April 2011 MediaWeek reported that it is the fifth most popular newspaper site in the world.

The Comment is Free section features columns by the paper's journalists and regular commentators, as well as articles from guest writers, with readers comments and responses below. The section includes all the opinion pieces published in the paper itself, as well as many others that only appear online.

The Guardian has taken what they call a very 'open' stance in delivering news, and have launched an open platform for their content. This allows external developers to easily use Guardian content in external applications, and even to feed third-party content back into the Guardian network. The Guardian also had a number of talkboards that were noted for their mix of political discussion and whimsy, until they were closed on Friday 25 February 2011. They were spoofed in The Guardian 's own regular humorous Chatroom column in G2. The spoof column purported to be excerpts from a chatroom on permachat.co.uk, a real URL which pointed to The Guardian's talkboards.

The paper has also launched a dating website, Soulmates, and is experimenting with new media, having previously offered 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

Newspaper (1821- )

25/25 - Celebrating 25 Years of Design

29 March - 22 June 2007

One of the most ambitious projects of 2005, the Guardian redesign has raised the benchmark of editorial design and already led to a significant uplift in Guardian sales. Having decided to shrink its broadsheet format to the new convenient Berliner size, the Guardian’s design team, led by creative director Mark Porter, used the opportunity to initiate a comprehensive and integral overhaul of the entire paper.

In an era dominated by instantaneous digital newscasts, the traditional newspaper is under increasing demands to compete for readership and attention. Yet the redesign of the Guardian was more than a reflexive response to its on-screen competitors; the team created a design which combined the most relevant aspects of newspaper tradition with digital technologies and printing processes to make the most of the reduced size, with colour photography, illustration or infographics on every page – a first in national newspaper design in the UK.

Although a newspaper has a shelf life of a single day, it is designed anew for each edition to accommodate changing news, advertisements and features. To ensure readability, coherence and continuity the design team implemented a rigorous five-column modular grid structure. A new typeface family – Guardian Egyptian – was commissioned from Christian Schwartz and Paul Barnes to enhance legibility and project a calm, contemporary personality.

More direct and visually focused, with an intelligible structure, and minimal distractions for the reader, the overall result is a newspaper designed to interpret daily news with clarity, complementing the high editorial standards the Guardian has celebrated since its first edition in 1821.

Q. What were the editorial requirements of the new paper and how does the redesign accommodate these requirements?

A.The brief was to create an intelligent serious paper, with a calm tone of voice, which retained a sense of the Guardian’s 200-year history, but was at ease with modern technology and culture. Our response was to design a calm, readable, typographically rigorous paper, which is also colourful and committed to visual journalism through the powerful use of images.

Q. Does the new-look Guardian relate to the Guardian’s heritage – what were the elements that you wanted to keep consistent?

A. Newspapers, and the way they are read, have changed so much over the last 20 years that it would be pointless to preserve design elements as if they were historic buildings. But it was important to retain the essence of the Guardian design philosophy: an approach to ordering the information, a way of using space and contrast, a love of typographic correctness, and a commitment to photography and illustration.

Q. What lessons did you learn looking at newspapers in Britain or abroad when working on the redesign?

A. As the project developed, we found that there were no existing models for what we were trying to achieve. We looked at, and admired, innumerable newspapers from all over the world, but most of the lessons we learnt were negative ones – things to avoid if we were to create something really special.

Q. Can you explain the origins of the term ‘Berliner’?

A. It simply refers to the size of the finished product. The Berliner was one of the three standard paper sizes in continental Europe when newspaper presses were built before the First World War. It caught on in Germany and Switzerland, and made inroads in France and Spain, but never made it across the channel until now. Ironically, there are no longer any Berliner-format newspapers published in Berlin.

Q. What were the reasons behind commissioning a new font for the redesign?

We tested fonts from many of the world’s top type designers, but in the end we didn’t find any which had all the characteristics we required. We were looking for something traditional yet modern, compact, and available in an enormous range of weights for use at text and display sizes. We found that the only way to achieve this was to create the typeface ourselves.

A. How has the newspaper adjusted to using full colour, and has it been successful?

Within a week or so the colour felt very natural. It gives us wonderful opportunities with photography, illustration and graphics. But it is also very useful in the typography, to aid navigation, and help distinguish different flavours of content. The biggest danger would have been to go over the top and use too much colour. But by combining certain elements in a few strong colours with black and a range of greys, we found a way of making the paper feel colourful but still intelligent and distinguished.

Q. The Guardian is a beautifully tooled paper, but how do you ensure that the readers are helped by the design rather than put off by it?

A. Any successful editorial design project puts the reader first, and usability was at the heart of this project. The typefaces were developed for legibility as well as character, and the pages are constructed to make the newspaper as readable and navigable as possible. Of course we care about aesthetics, but only when we are confident about functionality. We do not want readers look at a newspaper and see graphic design; they should see events, people and ideas.

Q. Explain how the "quiet" tone of the newspaper was achieved through its redesign?

A. We were keen to avoid the typographic inflation which is common in the newspaper world, whereby run-of-the-mill stories are routinely reported with headline sizes which would once have been reserved for World War III. We made an early decision to use a lighter headline typeface than any other daily newspaper, and to keep the headlines relatively small; we felt that as most media become increasingly strident, readers would value a calm considered voice. Of course, a newspaper must also reflect the energy and drama of its content, but we felt that could be better achieved by dynamic use of images

Q. What were the reasons for using a five column grid? How strictly is this used or do you allow some flexibility to respond to the news of the day?

A. A multi-section newspaper needs a strict grid structure to achieve coherence and consistency across sections designed by many different people. We chose five columns across the Berliner page – wider than most newspapers – because it was a much more comfortable reading measure; one of the strengths of the Guardian is its writing, and we aimed to make reading a genuine pleasure in the new format. But there are also underlying 10- and 20-column grids which, used with discretion, can inject some rhythm and variation into what could otherwise become a stately but rather monotonous run of pages.

Q. How has the reader responded to the design? What changes have you made since the launch?

A. Reader response has been overwhelmingly positive. We have adjusted some details in response to readers’ requests (certain colour combinations in a few places were problematic for colourblind readers, for example) but overall very little has changed. The G2 section is still evolving, as the concept of a magazine format with newspaper deadlines and production is so new that we are still exploring the possibilities.

Q. How many of the design decisions were influenced by the plans for the online version of the Guardian? What plans are there for the online?

A. Print and online are very different media. This was a print design project – and although we took into account the effect of the internet on the reading habits of our audience, we did not base any design decisions on our plans for the Guardian Unlimited. But we do have plans, and that is my next design challenge.

Q. What other newspapers and editorial designers do you admire?

A. I see much to admire in many newspapers, but I particularly love the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung for its austere beauty and The New York Times for its brilliant supplements (and its writing). Unfortunately, most of my design heroes – Willy Fleckhaus, Alexei Brodovitch, David King – are no longer designing magazines, but there is still plenty of talent in the industry right now.

© Design Museum, 2007

TIMELINE of technological change at the paper

1821 Founded by John Edward Taylor as the Manchester Guardian, published on Saturdays.

1830s Illustrations cut to make room for more news and advertisements

1855 Stamp Duty tax on newspapers abolished allowing the Guardian to publish daily, Monday to Saturday.

1872 Known for his liberal viewpoint, Charles Prescott Scott appointed editor.

1886 Illustrations reintroduced to accompany feature articles.

1908 Walter Doughty appointed first staff photographer.

1936 Ownership of paper transferred to the Scott Trust ensuring the paper’s independence.

1952 Unprecedented removal of advertising from front page, making the news the main focus.

1959 “Manchester” dropped from paper’s title to reflect national and international focus. Moves to London in 1961.

1988 Significant redesign by David Hillman introducing new masthead – a juxtaposition of an italic Garamond "The", with a bold Helvetica "Guardian”.

1992 G2 launched as daily tabloid-format supplement.

1995 First colour photograph on front page.

1999 Design changes led by Simon Esterson including clearer headings on news pages, new font, smaller headline sizes.

2005 Complete redesign of paper launches 12 September with Berliner format, new masthead and full colour.

2006 Designer of the Year nominee

2007 Selected for 25/25 - Celebrating 25 Years of Design

© Design Museum, 2007

The Guardian iPad App

The Guardian now has an iPad app. Previously if you wanted to read Guardian content on an iPad you could read the website, use the iPhone app or attempt the Digital Edition. I used to subscribe to the Digital Edition, a downloadable PDF of the paper (now with an online viewer) in exactly the same form as it was printed. By the looks of it, it’s much improved these days. I cancelled my subscription fairly quickly, because while it was good for reading some articles, seeing things like “continued on page 5” with no hyperlink felt weird, and some of the diagrams in articles had text on them which at the resolution the PDF was created at was unreadable. I complained about one issue like this and was sent a jpeg of the graphic at a higher resolution. Great customer service but it never seemed a scalable or sustainable solution.

So last year the Guardian did a survey of its iPhone (and presumably web) users asking what they’d think of an iPad app, and how much (if anything) they’d be willing to pay for it and/or a subscription. I figured that if they did it well, it could be revolutionary. The iPhone app was (and is) so good it still stands as a reference guide for how to do a content-driven app well. If the iPad app was as good, then it’d be great.

I’ve used a fair few magazine and news apps for the device and they’ve all been a bit of a let-down. As it’s the first mass-market tablet the iPad presented a new and unfamiliar environment to design apps for. Some went down the fill-it-with-crazy-interaction route, others down the scan-our-printed-edition route, most sort of somewhere in between, but nothing really felt natural to the device. It takes time to learn about the new medium rather than simply adapting what went before.

I think the Guardian app is mostly there. There are a few things that I think ‘hmm’ at (well one thing, the issues list), but it does what it’s designed for and is a pleasure to use. The design principles for the app (from this article by the project lead, Jonathon Moore) are beautifully focussed and simple:

▪ Reflect the strength of the form

▪ Create an interface that is always responsive and consistent

▪ Design simple user journeys

▪ Design for the majority (what are the 3 or 4 features that everyone will enjoy?)

▪ Realise we can’t do everything

▪ Appreciate simple is best

These are principles that can and should apply to the design of pretty much everything.

Strength of the form (of content)

It struck me that in all reviews of apps like these, much attention is given to the surface features of the software, but the content is largely ignored. It’s typical feature-itis, and ignores the user’s experience of a thing. The entire reason for someone using this app is to read the Guardian, and let’s be fair, reading a printed broadsheet (or even a Berliner) in almost any situation is rarely a comfortable experience. But you put up with it, it’s worth it for the content, and after a while the medium of crumpled, flapping paper tends to fade away. To do the same (or better) in an app requires a deep understanding of what the content is and how people regard it.

“But to me it was always about how to capture the essence of the print experience and translate that into forms and behaviours that felt right on the iPad.” Mark Porter

I know from experience of developing websites that content is often regarded as the ‘word filler’, viewed as the own-brand mystery sauce to be poured into the shell of the app, not really to be considered as an aspect of the design itself. This is a massive mistake.

Browsing the printed Guardian you see articles from a broad range of subjects, short snippets of fact here and there, and huge page-spanning features and editorials. Newspapers are varied. News websites, even the Guardian’s, are rather more uniform. The pressures of news-now, of getting the story ‘up there’ before anyone else changes the style and format of journalism. There seems to be less room for editorial and analysis - a story is happening now, and this is how it is, …but what does it mean? Most of that type of content remains in the printed paper.

“When we look at the pages of a printed newspaper we take in a range of stories at once. Some are big, some small; some are obviously more important than others. The decisions about space, position and treatment are the product of the experience and values of the editors, and when you buy a printed newspaper you’re not just buying the words and pictures, you’re also buying those values and judgments.” Mark Porter

Bringing that to an app requires a solid understanding of how it works in the paper - how to signal to the reader the relative importance and scale of an article. Is it news reporting? Is it opinion? Is it editorial? Analysis? In any paper it’s the typography and layout of the page that gives you this information.

“I worked closely with Barry Ainslie, our Art director for Sport, to define a range of typeface styles that suited our headlines from print. We defined the minimum required and slowly built them out as the app developed. It’s the first time we’ve used our (extensive) range of fonts to such effect in any of our digital products.” Andy Brockie

That extensive range of fonts is the Guardian’s own typeface, Guardian Egyptian by Christian Schwartz. It has over 200 fonts.

It’s quite clear from reading the app that a great deal of thought and effort has gone into the typography, making it work perfectly on the iPad (which isn’t a perfect medium for great typography in itself). Looking through the images detailing the design process shows just how many iterations of type and layout were tried. I must admit to feeling a bit envious of them to have such time and resources to spend on it.

The details of the typography are often subtle - body text is perfectly readable, sidebars with links to related articles don’t intrude, colours are carefully used to illuminate interactive elements and bring variety to front pages, and headline styles change depending on the type of article. Most articles get a regular weight headline, so that when you get to one with a lighter weight, you know it’s a different kind of content, comment, editorial, obituaries and so on. Features and very long articles get a big screen-filling photo with text overlaid on it, with the article starting below.

It all creates a beautiful effect, inviting you into the content, and letting you read it without intrusion or obstruction.

The treatment of adverts is interesting, and welcome. They do exist in the app, but are restricted to interstitials and section front pages. So by design, while reading an article you don’t see adverts. By design! No hacks, no reformatters, no plugins, no extra services, this is how the content is presented, by the Guardian. Only a few other news apps (like the Channel 4 News one) do anything similar.

Strength of the form (of device)

The iPad is a determinedly multifunctional thing, but it relies on the two universal gestures we can do with our fingers, the stroke and the tap. Stroke vertically to scroll, horizontally to swipe. Stroke with more than one finger - more functions. Tap to select, to activate things and to type. Tap and hold for a contextual functions. But how to design and build an app that responds to these things in a natural way? Apple apps provide clues, but obviously didn’t solve all the problems - there never was an Apple app with loads of content that updates frequently, unless you count the browser itself. But that web/app debate is a whole other kettle of worms, and I’m not going there.

The Guardian app solves this simply, in a way that we’ve come to learn feels natural for the device. There are very few interactions possible; Text scrolls vertically, and you swipe sideways to change articles or sections. You can tap on links to other articles and sections. There are a couple of settings and you can share some articles, but that’s it. Which leads to:

We can’t do everything

What’s interesting is what’s missing. There’s no double-tap to expand the text. You can’t tap and hold to select (and copy) text. Many articles can’t be shared - only the ones that are also on the website can be. There’s no pinch zoom. Navigation is pared-down to just a few common functions and links.

There’s no option to have larger text sizes, accessibility support (such as VoiceOver) is OK, but fails on the front pages (where it reads out the ID for that type of headline).

Some of these things could certainly be added, and the accessibility could be improved, but I know from experience that the desire to get all features into the shipped product usually leads to the product not shipping at all. This is version one of an exceptionally solid app, and I’m glad they’ve polished it as they have. They may not be able to do everything, but what they’ve done is very well done.

Design for the majority

And this leads nicely onto the features the app does have. I strongly suspect it’s aimed at readers of the paper who are looking for something more convenient than the print edition but find the website content lacking and maybe the small form-factor of the phone apps constraining, i.e., commuters. Commuters on trains, specifically. Phone signal on trains is notoriously variable, and train operators often charge stupid money for Wi-Fi, even when it works, so the Guardian app pre-downloads its content in the background in the very, very early morning.

But aha, you say, what if something newsworthy happens at 7AM? The app is out of date! Martin Belam nails it:

“To me, that is like arguing that there is no point the BBC broadcasting the Today programme or putting Newsnight on iPlayer, because the news might be “out of date” the instant the programme is finished.” Martin Belam

To my mind that’s where newspapers still have a unique and valuable offering. You can get live feeds of news from multiple sources, but it’s newspapers, books and documentaries that (on their different timescales) tie the stories together and provide context and meaning. As a result it actually doesn’t matter if a newspaper is a little out of date, provided the journalists have done their jobs properly.

I suspect that the majority of the app’s users want a better, more convenient newspaper, not a prettier newsfeed. It sounds like that’s what the Guardian thinks they want, too. I know I do.

Design simple journeys

Printed newspapers offer very simple user journeys. There are articles on pages, and the paper is divided into broad subject categories, as sections, and you simply flip through them, stopping to read whatever catches your eye. The app uses the same scheme, but also creates a front page for each section. The design of a front page like this isn’t a trivial matter, and it’s particularly interesting the technology the Guardian uses to build these from the content of the newspaper automatically. When I read about it I was amazed at what they’d done.

“This was to be the world’s most beautiful, elegant, interpretation of the print experience - with a few digital twists. It was also to be tied intelligently into our print production systems. That was big task – a task that we underestimated. From get-go.” Jonathon Moore

That’s an enormous task, and I bet immensely satisfying to work on. Looking again at the design evolution Andy Brockie presents, I wonder how the system works out where to put everything. I’m slightly relieved that there is some human input to fine tune things, because if all of that was automatically generated we’d better get ready for welcoming our new robotic overlords.

“Unlike the iPhone and Android apps, which are built on feeds from the website, this one actually recycles the already-formatted newspaper pages. A script analyses the InDesign files from the printed paper and uses various parameters (page number, physical area and position that a story occupies, headline size, image size etc) to assign a value to the story. The content is then automatically rebuilt according to those values in a new InDesign template for the app.” Mark Porter

And then from InDesign to HTML. Automagically. That’s the future right there.

Appreciate simple is best

The simplicity and straightforwardness of the Guardian app is (like its iPhone version before it) going to stand for quite a while as the acme of how these things should be done. It’s also a good reminder that simplicity is actually quite hard.

A note on the business model

Much has been said (by oh so many people) claiming that ‘print is dead’ and that newspapers are whipping a dead horse of a business model. If you look at the distribution of printed newspapers people pay for with money, vs. the assumed-free access to news on websites, you’d be right. There’s more to the story than that though. As I pointed out, there’s a special type of content that newspapers have, and despite everything, not much of that content is actually available online. The few newspapers that have made a success of paywalls, such as the Financial Times, do put their analytical and editorial content online, and it shows that plenty of people are willing to pay for it.

For a more general audience the received wisdom has been that people are highly resistant to paying for news, and the Guardian’s own survey showed that many people are. However, not all are, and many people (I include myself in this) actually want to if it means getting a higher quality product. I can’t put it better than Martin Belam, again:

“It strikes me that it is considered quite normal for car manufacturers to have a range of products that are designed and priced to suit different sectors of the market. When a news provider does it, from some sections of the web community there is an almost instant knee-jerk reaction that this proves news organisations “don’t get” digital.

Just because you can have an always on app that crams in updates and breathlessly fast breaking news from live blogs, doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to.” Martin Belam

There’s no doubt that the business models of delivering news to people are changing, but it’s quite clear that people still want news, and people still want journalism. I doubt the constantly-updating feeds of largely analysis-free news updates will provide much of a business model to anyone (except in aggregate) but actual journalism, that is most definitely worth something. Whether this app is what nails it we don’t know yet, but I think it’s got a damn good chance at making that breakthrough.

Paywalls and “The Guardian”?

Guardian ‘closely’ watching NYT’s paywall

by Sunny Hundal    

July 29, 2011 at 11:15 am

It seems the Guardian newspaper’s stance on implementing a pay-wall on its highly popular website has indeed softened.

Last year, in reaction to a story they were looking at ‘exclusive clubs’ to generate new revenue, its executive Emily Bell told me:

No – we are not contemplating a pay wall, nor as far as I’m concerned would we ever….they are a stupid idea in that they restrict audiences for largely replicable content.

But that experiment doesn’t seem to have been pursued vigorously, and Emily Bell has since left the paper.

Yesterday I emailed the Guardian gain to ask what they thought of the NYT’s success.

Editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger replied with this:

We’ve never been ideologically opposed to charging for content.

So far we haven’t seen a paywall model that wouldn’t impede the kind of open, collaborative journalism we are committed to doing – just look at how the Times paywall has effectively disconnected the paper from the web.

We’ve looked at the numbers for a New York Times style paywall and they don’t seem to work for us either. We haven’t seen any evidence that the commercial benefits from charging would outweigh the loss of audience and advertising revenue.

But the NYT experiment is thoughtful and sophisticated and of course we’ll be watching it closely to see how it works both journalistically and commercially.

(emphasis mine) I think its safe to say this stance is more open to paywalls than Emily Bell was.

The Times (News Int’l) paywall is indeed awful. But the New York Times paywall hasn’t suffered the same problems. In fact, its visitor numbers have held up well at around 33 million a month.

Responding on Twitter, Emily Bell said she was still vehemently opposed.

For the record, I think the Guardian should experiment with a porous paywall. It’s time to monetise that barrage of exclusive stories.

Update: To explain myself, I think the situation now is a reversal from earlier. Fair enough, you might say that still doesn’t mean the Guardian is looking for a paywall model.

But it is looking for a paywall model – it hasn’t found the right one yet. That still means, to my mind, it is looking for the right paywall model.

Update 2: @rj_gallagher points out that Alan Rusbridger never held the absolutist position that Emily Bell did. Fair enough, I’m happy to accept I thought the internal position had changed.

Update 3: I’ve amended the headline. Lots of you (rightly) felt it was egging the pudding too much. Fair enough.

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