page_title: The Guardian
section_title: Publication history
hierarchical_section_title: The Guardian / Circulation and format / Publication history
caption_attribution_description: en:The Guardian's Newsroom visitor centre and archive in en:London, 2004-08-27. Copyright 2004 © Kaihsu Tai.
context_page_description: The Guardian is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as The Manchester Guardian, and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers The Observer and The Guardian Weekly, The Guardian is part of the Guardian Media Group, owned by the Scott Trust. The trust was created in 1936 to "secure the financial and editorial independence of The Guardian in perpetuity and to safeguard the journalistic freedom and liberal values of The Guardian free from commercial or political interference". The trust was converted into a limited company in 2008, with a constitution written so as to maintain for The Guardian the same protections as were built into the structure of the Scott Trust by its creators. Profits are reinvested in journalism rather than distributed to owners or shareholders.
  The editor-in-chief Katharine Viner succeeded Alan Rusbridger in 2015. Since 2018, the paper's main newsprint sections have been published in tabloid format. As of February 2020, its print edition had a daily circulation of 126,879. The newspaper has an online edition, TheGuardian.com, as well as two international websites, Guardian Australia and Guardian US.
context_section_description: The first edition was published on 5 May 1821, at which time The Guardian was a weekly, published on Saturdays and costing 7d; the stamp duty on newspapers (4d per sheet) forced the price up so high that it was uneconomic to publish more frequently. When the stamp duty was cut in 1836, The Guardian added a Wednesday edition and with the abolition of the tax in 1855 it became a daily paper costing 2d.
  In October 1952, the paper took the step of printing news on the front page, replacing the adverts that had hitherto filled that space. Then-editor A. P. Wadsworth wrote: "It is not a thing I like myself, but it seems to be accepted by all the newspaper pundits that it is preferable to be in fashion."
  In 1959, the paper dropped "Manchester" from its title, becoming simply The Guardian, and in 1964 it moved to London, losing some of its regional agenda but continuing to be heavily subsidised by sales of the more downmarket but 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 centre-left stance during the 1970s and 1980s. It was both shocked and revitalised by the launch of The Independent in 1986 which competed for a similar readership and provoked the entire broadsheet industry into a fight for circulation.
  On 12 February 1988, The Guardian had a significant redesign; as well as improving the quality of its printers' ink, it also changed its masthead to a juxtaposition of an italic Garamond "The", with a bold Helvetica "Guardian", that remained in use until the 2005 redesign.
  In 1992, The Guardian relaunched its features section as G2, a tabloid-format supplement. This innovation was widely copied by the other "quality" broadsheets and ultimately led to the rise of "compact" papers and The Guardian's move to the Berliner format. In 1993 the paper declined to participate in the broadsheet price war started by Rupert Murdoch's The Times. In June 1993, The Guardian bought The Observer from Lonrho, thus gaining a serious Sunday sister newspaper with similar political views.
  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 and The Washington Post. The Guardian Weekly was also linked to a website for expatriates, Guardian Abroad, which was launched in 2007 but had been taken offline by 2012.
caption: The Guardian's Newsroom visitor centre and archive (No 60), with an old sign with the name The Manchester Guardian
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