When I was a kid my town had two newspapers. A broadsheet and a shitty rag called The News. The guy who inherited The News went on to buy the other paper and then like a cancer take over the world. Today 11 of the 12 Australian capital city dailies are owned by just two companies.
There are a few independent online news services but having the Guardian start an Australian branch is a welcome boost to democracy here. Visiting the Australian sub-site on a co.uk domain wasn't all that attractive for a country that has been independent since federation. So well done everyone at The Guardian.
I think they'll probably end up keeping guardian.co.uk just to prevent a squatter from taking it - this post sounds more like an explanation to readers as to why they're now redirecting to the new location and silently changing URLs to the new place.
At least, I don't think that The Guardian is going to ditch it any time soon - too much SEO & incoming links to the old tld to lose if they do.
The Guardian's been making a fairly obvious play for the US online market for several years now, particularly in their choice of opinion writers and topics.
I wish US-specific (or any country-specific) sites weren't allowed to use .com. There's a perfectly good .us TLD going almost unused, and as an international user it's very frustrating to find a shop I want to buy from on a .com, and then discover that it only sells to the US.
Yeah, beacause what we need is for government bureaucrats to make more rules, particularly regarding anything relating to the Internet.
I'll phone my representative, maybe he can sneak this in as a rider to a 2,000 page bill about abortion or gay marriage or funding the terrorists in Syria that nobody read.
.us is great, I too am surprised at how little I see it in use. Aside form the more restrictive application process, I think it partly stems from the fact .us came after .com and also initially a lot of users had confusion about TLDs (the type of people who would recite addresses like "h-t-t-p-colon-forward-slash-forward-slash-w-w-w-dot-example-dot-com" instead of just "example dot com"). Rightly or wrongly a lot of companies played it safe and went for .com.
On a related note, I have always disliked the fact that UK TLD disallows use of .uk, instead lumped with the crappy .co.uk.
> I have always disliked the fact that UK TLD disallows use of .uk,
Nominet have already floated the idea of opening up .UK for top level registration [1]. It wouldn't surprise me at all if they try and milk the market for topical 2LDs either.
I actually think it's a bad idea. Keeping a ccTLDs level reserved seems sensible to me. For instance, only UK Limited companies are allowed to register .ltd.uk domains.
I would mind less if there was more universal consistency, for example in France you have lemonde.fr, in Germany you have spiegel.de, in the UK you have independent.co.uk, Japan is japantimes.co.jp.
when MPs staff tell people their email address, they almost always have to say it two or three times before people believe them - the domain is simply parliament.uk (similarly, nhs.uk ).
The idea to use the top level was rejected, thankfully. I like the way the domains are categorised, so you can tell when something is a school, government, etc. It gives domains a certain level of assurance and authority.
> The idea to use the top level was rejected, thankfully.
It's still on their homepage (pink "Consultation" box) and the wording is "revised proposals". Worryingly they're also looking at introducing residency checks for individual registrations.
I've always found this very much to be a US a problem. Most shops from Oslo to Hong Kong will gladly ship to anywhere on the planet, at most you have to inquire about the shipping costs.
I have no idea why Americans are so phobic about shipping abroad. It can't be a service issue, on that front one would expect exactly the opposite.
Not sure, but it may be a legal issue. Some things that are legal in the US aren't in Europe. Some product contain materials that aren't legal in Europe.
Quite the opposite. I wish non-US companies were disallowed from using .com.
All American businesses use .com. Some non-American businesses do too, but it's first and foremost the "business" TLD for American businesses, just as .gov is used by the American government, and .org is loosely used for many types of American organizations.
In hindsight, doing .us.co or .us.com would have made a lot of sense. But hindsight is 20/20, and that's simply not what happened.
The UK has a similar privilege with postage stamps. They were the first to use stamps, and because of that they don't need to put the name of their country on their stamps:
"... on May 6, the Penny Black became the world's first postage stamp in use.
The stamp was originally for use only within the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and as such was in effect initially a local stamp. For this reason the name of the country was not included within the design, a situation which continued by agreement with foreign post offices, provided the sovereign's effigy appeared on the stamp. Envelopes sold with postage paid did not include this, so were marked with the country's name. In 1951, the special commemorative issue for the Festival of Britain included the name "Britain" incidentally. It could therefore be said that the name of the country then appeared for the first time on a stamp of the UK, although the word "British" had appeared on British Empire Exhibition commemorative stamps of 1924."
I'm one of the product guys at The Guardian involved in this project. It was quite an undertaking. Happy to field any questions you might have as best I can.
The blanket wildcard 301 redirect between .co.uk and .com was one of the quicker things to implement, since our path structure hasn't changed. These should cause pagerank to migrate fairly seamlessly. It's also no accident that the move was scheduled for late July, one of the slowest months for us in traffic terms, reducing risk. We saw Google referrer traffic take a nose dive yesterday, but appears to be recovering nicely today and is expected to return to pre-move levels over August.
This seems like a power move to gain international traction, but it immediately discounts it as a good source for national news, as it traditionally has been.
The Guardian as a UK-orientated news entity is/was on the death march. When they re-tooled their printing press a few years ago they said quite openly it would be the last printing press they would ever buy.
Guardian has been making a loss for years [1] in the difficult UK market, it's future is as an international orientated news source. I want them to stick around so I welcome the expansion.
The Guardian is not designed to make money. It has a budget, but that budget is defined by what it wants to achieve editorially, and that is only loosely to sell more papers. Ultimately it is designed to be "the worlds leading, liberal voice" and most editorial decisions are made with that in mind. The money comes from a trust which is managed by the parent company.
That is not to say that it wouldn't like to make a profit. But it doesn't 'need to' to survive as its money is generated by its parent company Guardian News & Media which is then plowed back in the paper and the trust. GNM does very nicely. Until relatively recently it owned the UK arm of AutoTrader. It also owns a lot of local talk radio stations and newspapers which turn a tidy profit. The irony is that many of these sources are more closely aligned politically to the Daily Mail that the Guardian.
The Guardian is extremely sociliast in its reporting. That's just not popular. You're not going to make any profit with that political viewpoint. (Although you'll certainly be popular on Reddit, the BBC, and other left leaning communities).
To make money, you need to be center / center right to appeal to most people. That's why newspapers like "The Sun" and "Daily Mail" absolutely dwarf "The Gruaniad" in readership.
If anything, to me it smacks of hypocracy rather than irony. It would be like a campaign setup to promote vegetarianism, bankrolled by a side venture selling beef burgers.
Socialist only by American standards (and, possibly, by the standards of certain Tories who still think of the US as a former British colony). By European standards, the Guardian is a fairly typical center-left newspaper. If you want to look at an actual socialist newspaper in the UK, try the Morning Star [1].
Ach, come on, the Guardian's incredibly left-wing. Or at least was until recently (less than 5 years).
When I used to buy papers a few times a week, I rotated the Guardian, The Independent and the Telegraph.
If you went outside the news articles the Guardian was foaming at its mouth, agenda crazy leftie. The editors, opinions and letters pages were filled with rubbish. Far more than the Telegraph was politely right wing.
Perhaps they've toned it down since focusing online, but though I don't read the site I still come across op pieces linked in various places that show otherwise.
The Guardian is a broadsheet, not a tabloid. If you want compare it something on the right use the Times or the Telegraph.
The tabloid equivalent of a left newspaper (though the terms make much less sense since the tabloids aren't nearly as political) would be the Daily Mirror, and it more than holds its own in the circulation wars.
In terms of papers sold, the Graun shifts about 400,000 a day - in contrast, the Daily Mail sells 8,000,000 papers. (the numbers may be a couple of years out of date.)
(aside: the majority of voters for all three of the big parties in the UK read the Daily Mail, of them that read a print newspaper.)
The Sun has consistently been the biggest daily in the UK for a long time, and I would suggest at least some of the parties have a majority buying that paper, historically the Mirror which comes in 3rd would be considered a more leftist paper (as was the guardian itself) and so would be much more likely to be a favorite amongst Labour voters.
The Mail hasn't had daily sales over 4 million this millennium. But since you apparently overestimate the guardians sales by 100% too I guess the point you're making still stands.
Thinking about it, they may be talking about readership rather than sales. People can pass around a paper in the break room or family members may read the same paper. I'm not sure how well they can estimate those numbers though.
Sales figures obviously give a much more concrete number for comparing paper to paper, but if you're trying to make a comparison to TV viewers or some other type of media maybe the readership numbers are more meaningful.
It says the Daily Mail has a circulation of about 1.8m daily, the Guardian has a circulation of about 200k daily. The Sun is the most widely bought newspaper, at 2.4m daily, but they're all declining across the board.
They've had "CIF America" for quite a while, and the most flamey stuff tended to be cross posted to the main CIF so they probably are prepared for the typical BTL backlash.
I'll be interested to see how they handle Sports and other national issues that are totally uninteresting to people from other countries BUT are very interesting to people from the UK (or where ever) that are accessing the site from outside the UK.
Or just UK orientated news for ex-pats like myself.
When I worked at BBC News we split the site into "UKFS" (uk facing site) and "IFS" (international facing site) but let readers pick via cookie which they wanted.
Since I left they changed it to always set to your region, which is always frustrating.
NYTimes does the International Herald Tribune, the 'global edition of the New York Times'. Guardian has had Guardian Weekly which is similarly international for around a decade too. Both are major-issues-only papers with a very slight US/UK slant.
There are a few independent online news services but having the Guardian start an Australian branch is a welcome boost to democracy here. Visiting the Australian sub-site on a co.uk domain wasn't all that attractive for a country that has been independent since federation. So well done everyone at The Guardian.