— Ch. 1 · The Manchester Guardian Weekly Launch —
The Guardian Weekly.
~5 min read · Ch. 1 of 5
The first edition of the Manchester Guardian Weekly printed on the 4th of July 1919 arrived just one week after the signing of the Treaty of Versailles. The newspaper viewed itself as a leading liberal voice and wanted to extend its reach, particularly in the United States, in the changing political climate after the First World War. The Weekly had the stated aim of presenting what is best and most interesting in the Manchester Guardian, what is most distinctive and independent of time, in a compact weekly form. Before long the Manchester Guardian could boast there is scarcely a corner of the civilised world to which it is not being posted regularly. Although the newspaper was banned in Nazi Germany for a time, initial reception remained good.
Format Changes And Editorship Shifts
For a large part of its early life the newspaper was a half-broadsheet format. Initially the notion of the best of the Guardian meant a weighty opinion piece for the front page. It evolved under the editorship of John Perkin in 1969 to include the use of pictures on the front page. In 1971 the English edition of the French daily newspaper Le Monde folded and the Weekly took on its 12,000-strong subscription list as well as four pages of Le Monde copy. A content deal was made with The Washington Post in 1975. Dedicated pages from both publications augmented Guardian articles until a redesign in 1993 under new editor Patrick Ensor led to their articles appearing across the Weekly. In the same year content from The Observer began to appear after the UK Sunday title was purchased by Guardian Media Group. Around this time the Weekly relocated from Cheadle to the south of Manchester to join the rest of the Guardian in London. This move afforded the Weekly better access to editors leader writers and news features. In 1991 technological advances enabled the first transmission by modem of pages to an Australian print site. Under Ensors editorship the paper began to be produced using the desktop publishing program Quark XPress. It became a tabloid-sized publication then in 2005 when the daily Guardian newspaper converted from a broadsheet to the smaller Berliner format the Guardian Weekly shrank to a half-Berliner while increasing pagination to its now-standard 48 pages. Full-colour printing was also introduced. By the end of Ensors editorship curtailed by his death from cancer in 2007 more advances in technology meant that even Weekly readers in the most remote locations were able to access the internet.