The Guardian

• 1. Introduction

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  The Guardian was born on the 5th of May 1821 - by chance the very day Napoleon Bonaparte died - as a weekly paper selling for 7d in the streets of Manchester. A cotton merchant named John Edward Taylor founded it with backing from a group of non-conformist businessmen called the Little Circle, and their prospectus promised the new publication would "zealously enforce the principles of civil and religious Liberty" and "warmly advocate the cause of Reform". Two hundred years later, it sits among the most-read news organisations on the planet, trusted by 84% of its own digital readers according to a September 2018 Ipsos MORI poll.

  How does a provincial trade paper born in the shadow of a massacre become a global force in journalism? What did it cost - financially, legally, politically - to survive that long? And what happens when a newspaper built on protecting sources hands documents over to the government, or publishes a story it later quietly amends? The answers run through wars, whistleblowers, phone-hacking scandals, and hard drives smashed to pieces in a basement.

• 2. Foundations and Contradictions

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  John Edward Taylor launched the paper weeks after police shut down the more radical Manchester Observer, whose reporters had championed the protesters at the Peterloo massacre. Taylor was openly hostile to those reformers. He wrote that they "have appealed not to the reason but the passions and the suffering of their abused and credulous fellow-countrymen, from whose ill-requited industry they extort for themselves the means of a plentiful and comfortable existence."

  The influential journalist Jeremiah Garnett joined Taylor from the beginning, and all the members of the Little Circle contributed articles. The working-class Manchester and Salford Advertiser had another description for the paper: "the foul prostitute and dirty parasite of the worst portion of the mill-owners". The Manchester Guardian was, in those years, generally hostile to labour's claims. On the 1832 Ten Hours Bill limiting child labour in factories, the paper doubted whether passing such a law would be anything other than "a gradual destruction of the cotton manufacture in this kingdom".

  In March 2023, an academic review commissioned by the Scott Trust determined that John Edward Taylor and nine of his eleven backers had direct links to the Atlantic slave trade through their interests in Manchester's textile industry. The paper that would later campaign against slavery had been built on money tied to it. That finding sits at the root of every subsequent tension between the paper's stated principles and its actual conduct.

• 3. Slavery and the Civil War

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  The Manchester Guardian opposed slavery and supported free trade, but those two commitments repeatedly pulled it in opposite directions. An 1823 leading article condemned the "cruelty and injustice" to enslaved people in the West Indies and welcomed the Slavery Abolition Act 1833. Yet the paper also argued against restricting trade with nations that had not abolished slavery, and when the abolitionist George Thompson toured, it said that "slavery is a monstrous evil, but civil war is not a less one".

  On the 13th of May 1861, weeks after the American Civil War began, the Manchester Guardian portrayed the Northern states as imposing a trade monopoly on the South and suggested that if the Confederacy were allowed free trade with Europe, "the day would not be distant when slavery itself would cease". It also supported the Confederacy's claimed right to self-determination, a position it shared with the Liberal leader William Ewart Gladstone.

  The paper criticised Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation for not freeing all American slaves. On the 10th of October 1862 it wrote of Lincoln: "it is also impossible not to feel that it was an evil day both for America and the world, when he was chosen President of the United States." Meanwhile, cotton workers in Manchester held a meeting on the 31st of December 1862 at the Free Trade Hall and passed a resolution expressing their "detestation of negro slavery". The paper reported their letter to Lincoln but complained that the meeting's "chief occupation" seemed to be "to abuse the Manchester Guardian". Lincoln replied, thanking the workers for their "sublime Christian heroism", and American ships sent relief supplies to Britain.

• 4. C. P. Scott's Long Reign

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  C. P. Scott edited the paper for 57 years from 1872 and bought it outright in 1907, when he purchased it from the estate of Taylor's son. Under his ownership the paper's moderate line shifted considerably. He backed William Gladstone when the Liberal Party split in 1886, opposed the Second Boer War against popular opinion, and supported the movement for women's suffrage while firmly condemning the tactics of the suffragettes. Scott wrote that their "courage and devotion" was "worthy of a better cause and saner leadership".

  Scott commissioned the playwright J. M. Synge and the painter Jack Yeats to travel together and document social conditions in the west of Ireland; their pieces were published in 1911 in the collection Travels in Wicklow, West Kerry and Connemara. Scott's personal friendship with Chaim Weizmann later played a role in the Balfour Declaration. Ownership of the paper passed in June 1936 to the Scott Trust, named after the last owner, John Russell Scott, who became its first chairman. The trust's stated purpose was to "secure the financial and editorial independence of The Guardian in perpetuity" - a formulation that would be tested repeatedly in the decades ahead.

• 5. Reinvention and National Identity

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  George Orwell wrote in Homage to Catalonia in 1938 that the Manchester Guardian was "the only one" of Britain's larger papers that left him "with an increased respect for its honesty" - a verdict shaped by the paper's coverage of the Spanish Civil War, where it supported the Republican government against General Francisco Franco's nationalists.

  On the 24th of August 1959, the paper changed its name to The Guardian, reflecting the growing weight of national and international affairs in its pages. In September 1961 it began printing in London for the first time, and Nesta Roberts was appointed as the newspaper's first London news editor, becoming the first woman to hold such a position on a British national newspaper. In October 1952, the paper had already made a significant shift by printing news on the front page, replacing the adverts that had occupied that space since 1821. Then-editor A. P. Wadsworth wrote with characteristic ambivalence: "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."

  The Berliner format switch in September 2005 cost £80 million and required new printing presses in east London and Manchester, since no British press could produce that format before the move. The redesign included a typeface family designed by Paul Barnes and Christian Schwartz, with more than 200 fonts - described at the time as "one of the most ambitious custom type programs ever commissioned by a newspaper".

• 6. Scoops and Controversies

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  In 1983, civil servant Sarah Tisdall leaked documents about the stationing of cruise missiles in Britain to The Guardian. The paper eventually complied with a court order and handed the documents over to authorities. Tisdall received a six-month prison sentence. Editor Peter Preston said afterwards: "I still blame myself", but argued the paper had no choice because it "believed in the rule of law". In a 2019 article, journalist John Pilger criticised that decision, accusing the paper of betraying Tisdall by choosing not to go to prison "on a fundamental principle of protecting a source".

  The paper's 2011 investigation into the News International phone-hacking scandal, in particular the hacking of murdered teenager Milly Dowler's phone, led to the closure of the News of the World - at the time the UK's best-selling Sunday newspaper. In June 2013, The Guardian broke news of the Obama administration's secret collection of Verizon telephone records, and subsequently revealed the PRISM surveillance program after whistleblower and former NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked the documents to the paper. The UK government's Cabinet Secretary, Sir Jeremy Heywood, acting on instruction from Prime Minister David Cameron and Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, ordered the hard drives containing Snowden's information to be destroyed. GCHQ agents visited The Guardian's offices in July 2013 and supervised the destruction. The Guardian's US operation still won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 2014 because the information had already been copied outside the United Kingdom.

  In 2016, The Guardian led an investigation into the Panama Papers, exposing then-Prime Minister David Cameron's links to offshore bank accounts. The paper has been named newspaper of the year four times at the annual British Press Awards, most recently in 2023.

• 7. Financial Survival

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  The Guardian was consistently loss-making until 2019. The National Newspaper division reported operating losses of £49.9 million in 2006, up from £18.6 million the year before. For the three years up to June 2012, the paper lost £100,000 a day. In January 2016 the publishers announced it would cut 20 per cent of staff and costs over three years, and a plan to move to tabloid format was announced in 2017, partly because it allowed printing by a wider range of presses. Trinity Mirror was contracted to handle printing, with the switch expected to save millions of pounds annually.

  In 2014, The Guardian launched a membership scheme - three tiers of monthly subscriptions - designed to reduce losses without erecting a paywall. By 2018 the scheme had brought in more than 1 million subscriptions or donations. The Guardian Media Group's annual report for the year ending April 2018 showed digital editions had crossed 50% of group revenues, and losses from news and media operations had fallen to £18.6 million, 52% lower than the prior year. The following year, the group reported its first profit, an EBITDA of £0.8 million before exceptional items. The Scott Trust Endowment Fund, which underpins the newspaper's independence, was valued at £1.01 billion as of 2018.

  In September 2024, The Guardian announced it was in talks to sell its Sunday sister paper The Observer to Tortoise Media. Journalists voted to condemn the sale and passed a vote of no confidence in the paper's owners. On the 18th of December 2024, the sale closed, with the Trust taking a significant stock position in Tortoise. The first print edition of The Observer under Tortoise appeared on the 27th of April 2025.