Guardian Takes Titles Compact With £50 Million Investment
Guardian Media Group, the newspaper publisher behind the Guardian and the Observer, has reportedly approved a £50 million investment to relaunch its titles in a new compact format.
It is understood that the Guardian and the Observer will become the country’s first national newspaper titles to adopt the Berliner size and shape used in France by Le Monde and recently embraced by former tabloid Les Echos preserves.
According to a report in the Financial Times, staff were last week briefed on plans, which will involve significant investment in new presses to replace the 20-year-old printing facilities currently used by the publisher.
The company has not yet signed firm orders or contracts for the new presses, but the new format is expected to replace the existing broadsheet editions by 2006. The move is being heralded as the biggest shake-up since the Manchester Guardian moved to London 40 years ago.
The publisher is understood to have experimented with a number of mock-ups ranging from very small upwards, ones with comment on the front page and even a news-lite product offering a Metro-like read. Guardian editor, Alan Rusbridger, said recently: “By a combination of thinking about size, journalism and design, I think we can come up with a pretty genuine newspaper. More pages is not what it is about.”
The initiative follows the launch last year of tabloid edition from the Independent and News International’s Times. The Independent saw its circulation rise by 14% year on year in the six months to May and the Times has also managed to stem declining sales (see Times Rolls Out Compact Edition Across The UK).
However, the latest ABC results show that the Guardian saw its circulation decline by 6.1% during the same period to 379,115 and the Observer dipped by 1.2% to just over the 450,000 mark.
Unlike the Times and the Independent, it is understood that the Guardian will switch entirely to the new Berliner format rather than produce a parallel broadsheet, which can prove extremely costly.
The decision looks likely to increase pressure on The Telegraph Group, which has drawn up proposals for its own tabloid edition. However, plans have put on hold pending the completion of the £665 million sale of the titles to the Barclay brothers (see Barclay Brothers Take Control Of Telegraph Titles).
Guardian Media Group: 020 7278 2332 www.gmgplc.co.uk
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