There are no records of the discussions held 100 years ago at the British regional newspaper known as the Manchester Guardian that led to its international weekly news venture. But it is unlikely that the timing of the launch was coincidental.
The first edition of the Guardian Weekly was published on 4 July 1919, a week after the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, the peace agreement between Germany and the Allied powers that formally concluded the first world war. In Europe and beyond, a new social and political world order was emerging after years of conflict. The Manchester Guardian viewed itself as a leading liberal voice and wanted to extend its reach, particularly in the United States.
The mission of its fledgling international publication was clear: “We aim at presenting what is best and most interesting in the Guardian, what is most distinctive and independent of time, in a compact weekly form.” It’s an ambition that still guides the Weekly, though much has changed since the first issues with their densely worded columns of spidery printing from type that had been set for the daily paper.
The Weekly’s initial reception was good, with most sales coming in the US. Before long, the Manchester Guardian was able to boast there was “scarcely a corner of the civilised world” to which it was not being posted, although it was to be banned in Nazi Germany.
The Guardian Weekly’s archive – housed in the Guardian’s main office at Kings Place, London – is small and fragmented. It lists details such as the names of -former editors – typically correspondents who had returned to Manchester from foreign postings. There are also tales of the ingenious ways copy found its way to print sites in Lancashire, Toronto, Sydney, various parts of the US and (after the second world war) Hamburg. But, while much around the Weekly has changed, its basic premise has endured.
Initially, the notion of “the best of the Guardian” meant a weighty opinion piece on the front page. This evolved, under the editorship of John Perkin, in 1969, to the innovative practice of photographs on the front, often an English scene worthy of a chocolate box.
For a large part of its early life, the Weekly was half the dimensions of a broadsheet. While the format has evolved significantly, the basic concept of editing a week’s worth of global news into one edition remains the same.
In 1971, when Le Monde’s English edition folded, the Weekly took on its subscribers as well as four pages of Le Monde copy. A syndication deal was made with the Washington Post in 1975. Stories from both publications broadened the Weekly’s international coverage for many years.
Patrick Ensor’s editorship from 1993 onwards brought modernising changes to the Weekly and coincided with the paper’s relocation, from its highly agreeable but gloriously isolated offices in Cheadle, south Manchester, to London where it joined the rest of the Guardian, which had moved to London in 1964.
No more were the occasional staff afternoons of tennis or cricket; the Weekly became newsier, with editorial changes pushed closer to deadline, while contributions were added from The Observer, the British Sunday newspaper purchased by the Guardian Media Group at that time.
These changes were helped by technological advances. In 1991, Perkin had overseen the first transmission of pages to the Australian print site by modem. And Ensor became the first editor within GNM to publish using Quark XPress software, which until then been used mainly for magazine production.
The Weekly began to take its appearance seriously. It became a -tabloid-sized publication; then, in 2005, when the daily Guardian news-paper converted from a broadsheet to the smaller, Berliner size, the Weekly shrank to a half-Berliner, printing in full colour.
By the end of Ensor’s editorship, curtailed by a diagnosis of terminal cancer in 2007, internet access for most readers was widespread, even in more remote locations around the world where many Weekly subscribers shared their cherished copies with neighbours and colleagues.
Natalie Bennett succeeded Ensor, and her editorship of the Weekly coincided with the Guardian’s increased focus on digital publishing. Breaking news was launched on the Guardian’s fast-growing website, rather than held back to meet print deadlines in the time-honoured way.
Significantly, Bennett’s appointment broke the tradition of male Guardian “lifers” in the Weekly editor’s chair. Raised in Australia and having lived and worked in south-east Asia, she brought a more global worldview to the Weekly. Green issues and the developing world were covered more, while UK and US coverage was toned down. Her passion for environmental politics led to her departure in 2012; she would go on to become the leader of the Green party of England and Wales for four years.
The Weekly’s evolution continued under Abby Deveney, a Canadian -editor who embraced long-form journalism, analysis and lively features.
The launch in 2011 of the Guardian US newsroom in New York, and a similar venture in Australia two years later, effectively turned the Guardian into a 24-hour global news operation. But, while the advent of digital publishing revolutionised news coverage, the anticipated collapse of print did not quite materialise.
In fact, it became clear that, alongside the relentless churn of digital news, there was also a healthy market for the kind of measured, contextualised current affairs coverage exemplified by the Weekly. While the Guardian’s digital reach enabled it to break huge international scoops such as Edward Snowden’s dis-closures about security surveillance in 2013, Amelia Gentleman’s uncovering of the Windrush scandal and Carole Cadwalladr’s reporting on Cambridge Analytica, such complex stories were also ideally adaptable to the Weekly’s format.
Deveney’s departure from the Weekly in 2017, to return to full-time academic study, coincided with a rethink of wider print strategy at Guardian News and Media. With the daily Guardian newspaper having recently switched to a tabloid format, the Weekly’s new editor, Will Dean, arrived with a brief to redesign the paper. Working alongside the Weekly team and art directors Chris Clarke and Andrew Stocks, Dean launched the new-look magazine in October 2018 and so began another chapter.
From 1919 to 2019: the end of the great war and the ashes of one world order, to the age of Trump, populism and the lurch towards another. Whatever the future holds, our aim is to keep the Guardian Weekly’s liberal voice sounding loud and clear long into its next century
Researched, written and edited by the Guardian Weekly team of Emily el Nusairi (deputy production editor), Neil Willis (production editor), Isobel Montgomery (assistant editor), Jim Falzarano (assistant editor), Graham Snowdon (deputy editor), Will Dean (editor) and Abby Deveney (former editor)
This article was updated on 3 July 2019 to include a reference to the recent relaunch of the Guardian Weekly in a magazine format.