The Guardian Weekly

The Guardian Weekly

The Guardian Weekly (15 February 2019)
Type	Weekly news magazine
Format	News magazine from 12 October 2018.
Owner(s)	Guardian Media Group
Editor	Graham Snowdon
Founded	4 July 1919; 105 years ago (4 July 1919)
Political alignment	Centre-left
Language	English
Headquarters	Kings Place, London, England
Sister newspapers	The Guardian, The Observer
ISSN	0959-3608
Website	theguardian.com/weekly

The Guardian Weekly is an international English-language news magazine based in London, England. It is one of the world's oldest international news publications and has readers in more than 170 countries.^[1] Editorial content is drawn from its sister publications, the British daily newspaper The Guardian and Sunday newspaper The Observer,^[2] and all three are published and owned by the Guardian Media Group.^[3]

The Guardian Weekly is currently edited by Graham Snowdon, while Will Dean is on a long-term secondment to the Guardian's Saturday magazine.^[1][3]

The first edition of the Manchester Guardian Weekly was printed on 4 July 1919,^[4] a week after the signing of the Treaty of Versailles. The Manchester Guardian viewed itself as a leading liberal voice and wanted to extend its reach, particularly in the United States, in the changing political climate after the First World War. The Weekly had the stated aim of "presenting what is best and most interesting in the Manchester Guardian, what is most distinctive and independent of time, in a compact weekly form".^[1] The initial reception was good. Before long the Manchester Guardian could boast "there is scarcely a corner of the civilised world to which it is not being posted regularly", although it is worth noting that the newspaper was banned in Germany by Hitler^[5] for a time.

For a large part of its early life the newspaper was a half-broadsheet format. Initially the notion of ‘the best of the Guardian’ meant a weighty opinion piece for the front page. It evolved, under the editorship of John Perkin,^[6] in 1969, to include the use of pictures on the front page.

In 1971, the English edition of the French daily newspaper Le Monde folded and the Weekly took on its 12,000-strong subscription list as well as four pages of Le Monde copy. A content deal was made with The Washington Post in 1975. Dedicated pages from both publications augmented Guardian articles until a redesign in 1993, under new editor Patrick Ensor, led to their articles appearing across the Weekly. In the same year, content from The Observer ^[2] began to appear after the UK Sunday title was purchased by Guardian Media Group.^[7]

Around this time the Weekly relocated from Cheadle, to the south of Manchester, to join the rest of the Guardian in London.^[8] This move afforded the Weekly better access to editors, leader writers and news features. In 1991, technological advances enabled the first transmission by modem of pages to an Australian print site. Under Ensor's editorship, the paper began to be produced using the desktop publishing program Quark XPress. It became a tabloid-sized publication; then, in 2005, when the daily Guardian newspaper converted from a broadsheet to the smaller, Berliner format,^[9] the Guardian Weekly shrank to a half-Berliner while increasing pagination to its now-standard 48 pages. Full-colour printing was also introduced. By the end of Ensor's editorship, curtailed by his death from cancer in 2007,^[10] more advances in technology meant that even Weekly readers in the most remote locations were able to access the internet.

The appointment of Australian Natalie Bennett^[11] as Ensor's successor coincided with the Guardian’s move to a digital-first publishing strategy. Breaking news stories were now launched on the Guardian's fast-growing website, rather than held back to meet print deadlines. In 2007 a digital edition^[12] of the Guardian Weekly was created, an editor's blog^[13] was added and a presence on social media sites Facebook^[14] and Twitter^[15] came soon after. The Guardian Weekly can be found online at theguardian.com/weekly, where subscription information is also available. During her editorship, Bennett emphasised the need for the Weekly’s agenda to be truly global and increased its coverage of environmental issues and the developing world. Her passion for environmental politics led to her departure from the paper in 2012. She would go on to become the leader of the Green Party of England and Wales until 2016.^[16]

The Guardian Weekly’s evolution continued under Abby Deveney,^[17] a newspaper, newswire and web editor with more than three decades of international experience living and working in North America, Asia and Europe. Under Canadian Deveney, the Weekly embraced long-form journalism, with a greater emphasis on insightful writing, deep analysis and lively features that showcase a well-rounded world view. Reportage of global themes and trends now features on the front page, while the back page is a stage for the Guardian’s influential opinion writers. Her global experience ensures that the Weekly never comes from one geographical perspective. This aim has been aided by the launch in 2011 of a Guardian US website, edited from New York City, followed two years later by a Sydney-based Guardian Australia site, which greatly increased the Weekly’s coverage opportunities in these key territories. Deveney left the editorship in 2017 and was eventually replaced by Will Dean in April 2018.

The Guardian Weekly was re-designed in October 2018 as a glossy magazine.^[18] It was announced that the circulation of the magazine would increase, and three different editions would be published: International, North American, and Australian.^[19]

The title is printed at sites in the UK, Poland, Australia, New Zealand and the United States in a full-colour news magazine format. The standard publication runs to 64 pages since its change of format (from a newspaper) on 12 October 2018.

Britain, Australia, the United States and Canada are the Guardian Weekly’s top markets, followed by New Zealand, France and Germany. With a following in more than 170 countries,^[1] the Weekly’s audience is spread around the world.^[20]

Surveys reveal that some 60% of subscribers had taken the paper for more than a decade. Readership tends towards a well-educated demographic. The typical reader is aged over 45, educated to at least degree level and either working in or retired from education, with a 59-41 male-female split.^[1]

Readers say typical reasons for subscribing include: a family habit of taking the Manchester Guardian; a spell working abroad in development or teaching; and retirement or emigration (often to Australia, New Zealand or North America). Others often report their route to initiation into the Guardian Weekly family came by having a copy passed along to them in a workplace or during a secondment.

The paper's readers include many world statesmen, including Nelson Mandela, who subscribed during his time in prison and described the paper as his "window on the wider world".^[21] George W. Bush was reportedly the first President of the United States since Jimmy Carter not to subscribe to the Guardian Weekly, breaking tradition with Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton.^[22]

In 2022, British journalist Lucy Siegle criticized The Guardian, the Guardian Media Group and the broader media for perpetuating an "omerta" — a code of silence — surrounding workplace harassment, particularly in their own institutions. Siegle, one of seven women, who experienced sexual harassment by journalist Nick Cohen during her time at The Guardian, highlighted how media organizations often fail to properly address such misconduct.

Barrister Jolyon Maugham KC echoed her concerns about the media's reluctance to examine and report on sexual harassment in their own institutions and called for this damaging silence to end: “The shameful, if mutually convenient, omerta on the reporting of sexual misconduct within the media sacrifices the careers and dignity of young women to the convenience of predatory older men. It must not continue”.^[23] In May 2023, The New York Times reported that Roula Khalaf prevented the publishing of a Financial Times article covering sexual misconduct allegations against Nick Cohen.^[24]

The Telegraph reported: "Mr Cohen left the newspaper with a settlement following complaints of sexual harassment that spanned a period of 17 years. Guardian News and Media (GNM), which owns The Observer and The Guardian, has now been accused of a cover-up after seven women claimed they were harassed by him both inside and outside the workplace. Some of his alleged victims have accused GNM of failing to act on complaints they made to managers over a period of years."^[25]

In 1983, the paper was at the centre of a controversy surrounding documents regarding the stationing of cruise missiles in Britain that were leaked to The Guardian by civil servant Sarah Tisdall. The paper eventually complied with a court order to hand over the documents to the authorities, which resulted in a six-month prison sentence for Tisdall,^[26] though she served only four. "I still blame myself", said Peter Preston, who was the editor of The Guardian at the time, but he went on to argue that the paper had no choice because it "believed in the rule of law".^[27] In a 2019 article discussing Julian Assange and the protection of sources by journalists, John Pilger criticised the editor of The Guardian for betraying Tisdall by choosing not to go to prison "on a fundamental principle of protecting a source".^[28]

The Guardian published the US diplomatic cables files and the Guantanamo Bay files in collaboration with Julian Assange and WikiLeaks.^[29] When some of the diplomatic cables were made available online in unredacted form, WikiLeaks blamed Guardian journalists David Leigh and Luke Harding for publishing the encryption key to the files in their book WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy.^[30] The Guardian blamed Assange for the release of the unredacted cables.^[31]

Journalist Glenn Greenwald, a former contributor to The Guardian, accused The Guardian of publishing false claims about Assange in a report about an interview Assange gave to Italian newspaper La Repubblica. The Guardian article had claimed that Assange had praised Donald Trump and criticised Hillary Clinton and also alleged that Assange had "long had a close relationship with the Putin regime". Greenwald wrote: "This article is about how those [Guardian's] false claims—fabrications, really—were spread all over the internet by journalists, causing hundreds of thousands of people (if not millions) to consume false news".^[32] The Guardian later amended its article about Assange to remove the claim about his connection to the Russian government.^[33] While Assange was in the Ecuadorian embassy, The Guardian published a number of articles pushing the narrative that there was a link between Assange and the Russian government.^[29]

In a November 2018 Guardian article, Luke Harding and Dan Collyns cited anonymous sources which stated that Donald Trump's former campaign manager Paul Manafort held secret meetings with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London in 2013, 2015, and 2016.^[34] The name of a third author, Fernando Villavicencio, was removed from the online version of the story soon after publication. The title of the story was originally 'Manafort held secret talks with Assange in Ecuadorian embassy'. A few hours after publication, 'sources say' was added to the title, and the meeting became an 'apparent meeting'.^[35] One reporter characterised the story, "If it's right, it might be the biggest get this year. If it's wrong, it might be the biggest gaffe." Manafort and Assange both said they had never met, with the latter threatening legal action against The Guardian.^[36] Ecuador's London consul Fidel Narváez, who had worked at Ecuador's embassy in London from 2010 to July 2018, said that Manafort had not visited Assange.^[35] Serge Halimi said Harding had a personal grievance against Assange and noted that Manafort's name does not appear in the Ecuadorian embassy's visitors' book and there were no pictures of Manafort entering or leaving "one of the most surveilled and filmed buildings on the planet".^[35] The Guardian has neither retracted nor apologised for the story about the meeting. Stella Moris, Assange's wife, said The Guardian failed in its responsibility to Assange and its "negligence has created such a problem that if Julian dies or is extradited, that will forever blot the reputation of the Guardian".^[29]

Jacob Appelbaum alleged at the LoganCIJ16 at the Centre for Investigative Journalism, that The Guardian, The Observer and Guardian Media Group do not protect their sources.^[37]

• Official website
• Founding of the Manchester Guardian
• A visual history of The Guardian Weekly