Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Guardian was founded on the 5th of May 1821 in Manchester by cotton merchant John Edward Taylor, with financial backing from the Little Circle, a group of non-conformist businessmen. It launched as The Manchester Guardian and changed its name in 1959.
The Guardian is owned by the Scott Trust Limited, a company created in 2008 as the successor to the Scott Trust charitable foundation established in 1936. Profits are reinvested in journalism rather than distributed to owners or shareholders. The Scott Trust Endowment Fund was valued at approximately £1.01 billion as of 2018.
In June 2013, The Guardian revealed the secret collection of Verizon telephone records by the Obama administration and exposed the PRISM surveillance program, after former NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked documents to the paper. UK government agents from GCHQ visited The Guardian's offices in July 2013 and supervised the destruction of hard drives containing the Snowden files. The Guardian US won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 2014 for the coverage.
The Guardian has been named newspaper of the year four times at the annual British Press Awards, most recently in 2023.
The Guardian switched to tabloid format in January 2018. Its print circulation was 105,134 in July 2021, down from a certified daily average of 380,693 in December 2005 and 204,222 in December 2012. The paper publishes Monday through Saturday.
In 1983, civil servant Sarah Tisdall leaked classified documents about cruise missile deployment to The Guardian. The paper complied with a court order to surrender the documents, and Tisdall was subsequently sentenced to six months in prison. Editor Peter Preston said he still blamed himself but argued the paper had no choice because it believed in the rule of law.