Part 5. Perpetual revolution: Finding a voice in the Digital Age (1995-present)

In 1995 Alan Rusbridger took over from Peter Preston. The years of his tenure have seen the start of the digital era, bringing perhaps the biggest changes the paper (sorry, multi-platform media organisation) has ever known. That year saw the Guardian make its first foray on to the internet with the creation of the New Media Lab and a range of experimental websites.

While around 270,000 UK residents still buy the paper each day in its redesigned Berliner format, 2.5 million browsers are now reading and interacting with it globally online each day – on desktops and, increasingly, via apps on smartphones and other digital devices. The articles they read online are supplemented by videos, podcasts and data-rich graphics, as well as tweets from reporters caught in the midst of a fast-moving story.

In ever-increasing numbers, our readers are telling us what they think – via our letters page, yes, but also via our readers’ editor, in the comments beneath online articles, by submitting their own photographs and videos, and by using Guardian data made available via the Open Platform to produce their own graphics and blogs.

In the wider world too it has been a period of great change – the New Labour government came and went; Princess Diana died; a peace agreement was signed in the seemingly intractable Northern Ireland conflict, although not before an IRA bomb destroyed the Guardian’s Isle of Dogs printing presses, prompting an unprecedented collaboration with the Daily Telegraph, whose West Ferry plant printed the Guardian for several years after the attack. Recent key news events have had a distinctly international flavour – 9/11, Afghanistan, the war in Iraq, the WikiLeaks cables, the Arab spring protests in the Middle East.

In 2008 the Guardian moved from its cherished but tatty and environmentally unfriendly Farringdon Road office to newly built premises at Kings Place. Alongside the surprise of clean carpets and comfortable chairs, the new-look Guardian has a fully integrated newsroom, web-first publication as a matter or course, and a recognition of the importance of new digital ways of telling stories.

In March 2011 Rusbridger announced that a number of key editorial staff will move to New York this summer as the Guardian eyes a major international expansion. It’s been a long road from Manchester to Manhattan, but the hope is that all those Taylors and Scotts – not to mention Montague, Crozier, Wadsworth, Hetherington and the thousands of others who have sustained the Guardian through good times and bad – would still recognise in its 21st-century incarnation the original desire, born at Peterloo, to communicate the truth so that justice might prevail.

162 New media lab

The Guardian’s new media lab – an offshoot of the product development unit – was established in 1995 “to implement the proposed electronic publication of the Guardian and Observer”. Go2 was launched as the website for the Guardian’s computer, science and technology supplement OnLine. Wired UK was published out of the product development unit in 1995. A year later a dedicated site for Euro ’96 was launched, followed by Shift Control, a weekly webzine sponsored by Whitbread. RecruitNet was also launched, placing Guardian recruitment advertisements on the internet for the first time. Ian Katz became web editor in 1997. The Guardian and Observer election website went live in February, and football.co.uk was launched in August.

163 War on sleaze

The Guardian was at the forefront of the sleaze revelations that contributed to the downfall of the Conservative government in 1997, with a series of investigations into the affairs of Conservative MPs, including Jonathan Aitken and Neil Hamilton. Its reputation for investigative journalism was cemented by the collapse of the libel case brought against the paper by former minister Jonathan Aitken. Aitken was convicted of perjury and jailed in June 1999, and the investigations won the Guardian critical acclaim from all sides, including the newspaper of the year award in both 1997 and 1998.

164 Labour landslide

Tony Blair’s New Labour party came to power in May 1997, and the Guardian was raucous in its cheering as 18 years of Conservative government ended.

165 The death of Princess Diana

The death of Princess Diana in August 1997 was as heart-stopping a moment as the assassination of President Kennedy. Jonathan Freedland, who reported on the return of the princess’s body from Paris, captured the hallucinatory mood of those days.

166 Corrections and clarifications

In 1997 the Guardian became the first national newspaper to appoint a readers’ editor, completely independent of the editor, to handle complaints about the paper’s journalism. Ian Mayes was the first incumbent, writing a weekly column about issues arising from readers’ concerns and producing a daily corrections and clarifications column. The first of those columns (see above) appeared on 5 November 1997. Thanks to Mayes’ wry, teasing prose, the column quickly became cult reading and spawned several books. Five years later the Guardian introduced an editorial code, anchoring the principles that govern its conduct and journalism firmly in the values of C P Scott: “A newspaper’s primary office is the gathering of news. At the peril of its soul it must see that the supply is not tainted.”

167 Guardian Unlimited

Guardian Unlimited was launched in 1999. The network initially consisted of News Unlimited, Football Unlimited, Cricket Unlimited and Jobs Unlimited. Film Unlimited, Education, Books, Shopping and Money soon followed. In September 1999 the site registered one million users. The first official ABCe statistics in October 1999 counted 10.2 million page impressions a month. By March 2001 GU had more than 2.4 million unique users, making it the most popular UK newspaper website. Guardian Unlimited beat the New York Times and Wall Street Journal Online to win the Webby award for best newspaper website in 2005, 2006, 2007 and again in 2009.

168 9/11

The devastating attack on the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001 was the first great news event of the internet age. Guardian Unlimited’s international traffic soared after 9/11, with an increasing audience, particularly in the US, for its diverse range of viewpoints and liberal news agenda. But the event was also powerfully evoked in print, with a front page acclaimed as “bold, simple and courageous”.

169 The Guardian and the monarchy

In 2000 the Guardian nailed its republican colours to the mast with an editorial calling for a referendum on the future of the monarchy: “We declare our hand: we hope that in time we will move – by democratic consensus – to become a republic.” At the same time, the paper announced its backing for a legal challenge to the 300-year-old law banning Roman Catholics and other non-Protestants from succeeding to the British throne, on the grounds that it clashed with the Human Rights Act.

170 Hugo Young

The death of Hugo Young in 2003 was an enormous loss. He was not just the Guardian’s principal political commentator – immensely well informed and surefooted in his judgment – he was also chair of the Scott Trust. “His prose had a resounding, magisterial tone,” said the Times in its obituary, “and that seemed to be reflected in Young’s physical presence: tall, straight-backed and decisive. Yet there was always an essential modesty and humanity to him, too. He never sought the inflation of titles and, to the end, remained clear that his only real ambition was to carry on working as ‘Hugo Young: Journalist’ for as long as his words were read.” Young was replaced as chair of the Scott Trust by Liz Forgan, another long-time friend of the paper and former women’s editor.

171 War in Iraq

Sean Smith is recognised as one of the UK’s leading war photographers, a reputation which owes much to the remarkable photographs he took during the 2003 war in Iraq. He has also eagerly embraced film-making in a world where news photographers are increasingly expected to be adept at producing moving images too.

172 Guardian Films

Guardian Films was born in 2003 in a sleeping bag in the Burmese rainforest, where its founder Maggie O’Kane had spent weeks searching for the child soldiers at war with the country’s junta. Once the award-winning foreign correspondent had written a cover story for G2, she got a call from the BBC’s documentary department, which was researching a film on the conflict. Could she give them all her contacts? From that conversation a television production company was born.
Guardian Films has focused on producing films exposing corruption and injustice in Britain and in some of the world’s most dangerous places. It has won many major broadcasting awards, including an international Emmy (shown in the display cabinet) for Baghdad: A Doctor’s Story, which was filmed by an Iraqi trained by the Guardian as a film-maker, and a Royal Television Society award for Sean Smith’s film about the surge in Iraq.

173 Dear Limey Assholes … the story of Clark County

In the run-up to the 2004 US presidential election, G2 launched Operation Clark County inviting readers to write to undecided voters in the crucial state of Ohio. In the first three days 11,000 people requested addresses (before hackers forced the closure of the database). Reactions from the US were mixed – from “Thank you, thank you, thank you! What a wonderful idea! I am a US citizen who is scared to death that Bush and Klan will get back in” to “I don’t give a rat’s ass if our election is going to have an effect on your worthless little life. I really don’t. Oh yeah, and brush your goddamned teeth, you filthy animals.” The county swung from Democrat to Republican, with some speculating that the Guardian intervention had contributed to the result.

174 Bush gets back in

On the day after Bush’s re-election in 2004, Emma Brockes wrote a lead story for G2 exploring the mood of depression across liberal Britain. The cover of the section was wonderfully clever and pithy.

175 The G2 bus

Ian Katz, who succeeded Roger Alton as features editor when Alton became editor of the Observer, survived the Clark County debacle to enjoy a long, successful and imaginative stint. One of his obsessions was an old Routemaster bus which he took to events such as the Hay and Glastonbury festivals (both sponsored by the Guardian during this period) and to the Edinburgh festival. Some speculated that his love of the Routemaster developed as a result of living next door to Boris Johnson, who based his 2008 London mayoral election campaign on opposition to new-fangled “bendy” buses.

176 The Berliner

On September 12 2005 the new Berliner Guardian was launched, with a ground-breaking design by the paper’s art director Mark Porter in a mid-size format. The Guardian became the UK’s first full-colour national newspaper, and the first UK national newspaper to adopt this size, which necessitated brand-new printing presses in east London and Manchester. The award of newspaper of the year at the British Press Awards, the coveted “black pencil” for best overall design at the D&AD awards, and “The World’s Best Designed Newspaper” award from the Society for News Design all followed.

177 Podcasts and multimedia

The Guardian broke into the world of podcasting with the Ricky Gervais Show in 2005, which rapidly became the most popular podcast in the world. Its success led to further investment in audio and the debut of a daily World Cup show in 2006, which transformed into Football Weekly. The Guardian now produces 10 weekly podcasts, covering subjects as diverse as science and technology, film and music, and politics and business. The Guardian also invested in online video, developing the technical capacity to play video on guardian.co.uk, and recruiting a small team of producers to work alongside Guardian Films in 2007. This has transformed the way the Guardian practises journalism, most notably when Paul Lewis obtained footage of Ian Tomlinson being attacked by a police officer at the G20 protests in 2009. Other recent highlights include a package on Haiti six months on from the earthquake, John Harris’s election tour of Britain, and Marcel Theroux’s series on the New Europe.

178 Comment is Free

The Guardian’s award-winning comment site was launched in 2006 with the aim of providing “an open-ended space for debate, dispute, argument and agreement and to invite users to comment on everything they read”. This was also the year in which the Guardian switched to a “web-first” approach to foreign and city news – posting it to the web as soon as it has been written, edited and subbed.

179 New look for Guardian Unlimited

In 2007 Guardian Unlimited was redesigned for web 2.0 with interactive content, images, graphics and video given greater importance, and a tagging system to make content more findable. The new-look site placed a growing emphasis on live-blogging as a way of telling fast-moving stories using a range of media including Twitter, YouTube and AudioBoo as well as more traditional sources and (unthinkable in the past) good stories attributed to rival media organisations.

180 Katine

The Guardian’s four year Katine development project in Uganda, which began in 2007, is unique in having given readers and users a detailed insight into the challenges faced by a rural community in their struggle to lift themselves out of extreme poverty. It represented the Guardian’s first major foray into Web 2.0 by telling the story of Katine through a mixture of text, films, audio, picture galleries and interactive graphics. The £3m project, funded in part by readers, won a number of awards for bringing an unparalleled degree of transparency to a subject that is often ignored by mainstream media.

181 Move to Kings Place

By the end of 2007 Guardian Unlimited had a staff of more than 150 working in increasingly close collaboration with the paper’s staff. The time had come to integrate the two teams fully in recognition of the ever-greater importance of the web for the Guardian’s future. In 2008 the Guardian moved from its Farringdon Road office to newly built premises at Kings Place. At the same time, the Guardian Unlimited brand disappeared as the site was rebranded guardian.co.uk. ABCe figures revealed guardian.co.uk as the first UK newspaper website to record 20 million unique users a month.

182 President Obama

The Guardian greeted the end of the Bush era and the victory of Barack Obama over John McCain with something close to ecstasy. The aura may have faded a little since, but heck it felt good at the time.

183 Death of Ian Tomlinson

Newspaper seller Ian Tomlinson died while trying to make his way home during the G20 protests in April 2009. His death was initially put down to a heart attack, and not connected to police, but an investigation by the Guardian tracked down witnesses and photographs contradicting this version of events. Six days after the death, the Guardian released video footage showing conclusive evidence of Tomlinson being struck by a baton and pushed to the ground by a police officer.
The investigation was seen as a landmark in the use of social media and citizen journalism. Simon Harwood, a member of the Metropolitan police’s specialist Territorial Support Group said his actions were “justified”. But in April 2011, an inquest jury found that Tomlinson had been “unlawfully killed”.

184 Apps

A Guardian App for iPhone and iPod Touch was launched in 2009, and downloaded nearly 70,000 times in its first month. In 2010 the Guardian’s first iPad app, Eyewitness, showcased the Guardian’s centrespread photography.

185 Data journalism and Open Platform

The launch of the Open Platform in 2009 made the Guardian’s tools and resources, including an archive of a million articles, available to application developers. At the same time, the Guardian launched the UK’s first national data journalism site: the Datablog. Following on from the tax gap series on corporate tax avoidance and the Free Our Data campaign, the Datablog published the raw statistics behind the news in easy-to-export formats, inviting readers to help analyse and visualise the data. The Datablog was commended by the Royal Statistical Society in its 2010 awards for journalistic excellence. The Guardian’s World Government Data search lets users find data from open data sites around the world, including detailed UK government spending figures after the release of the UK Treasury’s huge COINS database. The WikiLeaks data releases on Afghanistan, Iraq and the US embassy cables brought the project to international attention.

186 Climate change

For the Copenhagen climate change conference in December 2009, the Guardian launched an initiative with 55 other newspapers from 45 countries to produce a common editorial demanding a deal to combat climate change. “The science is complex but the facts are clear,” argued the editorial. “The world needs to take steps to limit temperature rises to 2C, an aim that will require global emissions to peak and begin falling within the next 5-10 years. A bigger rise of 3-4C – the smallest increase we can prudently expect to follow inaction – would parch continents, turning farmland into desert. Half of all species could become extinct, untold millions of people would be displaced, whole nations drowned by the sea. The controversy over emails by British researchers that suggest they tried to suppress inconvenient data has muddied the waters but failed to dent the mass of evidence on which these predictions are based.”

187 The 2010 general election

Guardian photographer Martin Argles was named UK Picture Editors’ Guild photographer of the year and won photo essay of the year for his exclusive pictures of Gordon Brown’s last days in No 10. Like his political rivals in the inaugural candidates’ TV debates, the Guardian in its editorial agreed with Nick Clegg, prompting apoplexy on the letters pages and a collapse in Lib Dem support at the ballot box. Analysis of the election was transformed into a real-time affair, the highlight of the coverage being Andrew Sparrow’s live blog, which earned him political journalist of the year at the UK press awards.

188 Mutualisation and crowdsourcing

Alan Rusbridger, delivering the Cudlipp lecture in 2010, articulated a new model for journalism which is no longer an inert, “us” to “them” form of publishing: “It’s a trend about how people are expressing themselves, about how societies will choose to organise themselves, about a new democracy of ideas and information, about changing notions of authority, about the releasing of individual creativity, about an ability to hear previously unheard voices; about respecting, including and harnessing the views of others. About resisting the people who want to close down free speech.” Building on a successful collaboration with readers in 2009 to explore and expose the details of MPs’ expenses and the continuing growth of liveblogging, in which reader comments helped steer and inform coverage of events, for the 2010 World Cup the Guardian enlisted a Fans’ Network – a global team of 125 supporters and bloggers whose contextual tweets, blogs and photographs were promoted on guardian.co.uk during the tournament.

189 WikiLeaks

In November 2010, a unique collaboration with the WikiLeaks website and a group of foreign media partners produced a series of eye-opening reports based on huge caches of leaked official US documents about Iraq and Afghanistan and a slew of embassy cables talking in undiplomatic language about heads of state and government. We learned that Saudi Arabia wanted the US to attack Iran; US diplomats spy on the UN; the Bank of England governor Mervyn King dismissed George Osborne as a squeaky-voiced lightweight; and Prince Andrew is “rude” (and hates Guardian journalists). Combining the Guardian’s tradition of investigative reporting with new models of data journalism and crowdsourcing, specialists trawled through millions of documents and made them available to citizen journalists via a searchable database.

190 Newspaper of the Year 2011

The Guardian’s groundbreaking journalism and innovation were recognised at the 2011 Press Awards where it was named Newspaper of the Year for its partnership with WikiLeaks, which produced the leaked US embassy cables. The judges said the story put “the Guardian at the top of the news headlines and some say it will change relationships between governments and the press and public forever”. One commented: “What an infuriating paper it is, but it does continue to try to take journalism into the future.”

← Part 4. Broadening horizons: Pop goes the Guardian (1960-94)