07 May 2021 - The Guardian celebrates its 200th birthday
The Guardian celebrates 200 extraordinary years
GNM Press Office (The Guardian, 30/04/2021)
The Guardian celebrates its 200th birthday in May 2021 with a digital festival of live events and masterclasses, journalism spanning digital and print formats, and a new brand campaign under the banner “200 years a work in progress” to inspire readers to support its ongoing investment into world-class journalism.
The first edition of the Manchester Guardian, as it was then known, was published on 5 May 1821. Since then, the Guardian has earned a reputation for powerful, high-impact journalism read by millions worldwide.
To mark the moment, from Wednesday 5 May, the Guardian will publish a range of journalism in digital, print, video and audio formats, examining the paper’s origins, its highs and lows, and how its exclusives and investigations changed the world.
How did the Guardian survive 200 years?
Larry Elliott (The Guardian, 07/05/2021)
On the day the Guardian was born in Manchester on 5 May 1821, the big story was taking place 4,800 miles away on an island in the south Atlantic.
The fact that it took weeks for news of Napoleon Bonaparte’s death on St Helena to become known shows how communication has sped up down the years. It also shows just how long the Guardian has been around.
This was the world of the first Industrial Revolution, built around steam power and textiles, a time when Manchester businessmen wanted to harness the power of the press to push for the vote. Electric power was a thing of the future. The rich got around on horseback; the poor walked.
What we got wrong: the Guardian’s worst errors of judgment over 200 years
Randeep Ramesh (The Guardian, 07/05/2021)
A daily newspaper cannot publish for 200 years without getting some things wrong. This one has made its share of mistakes.
There will always be errors of news judgment given the nature of the work. Tight deadlines meant the sinking of the Titanic was relegated to a small spot on page 9 in 1912; errors of scientific understanding resulted in a 1927 article that promoted the virtues of asbestos, and others in the late 1970s that warned of a looming ice age.
But the most noticeable missteps stem not from the news pages but from the editorial column. For it is here that readers find out what the paper thinks about the great issues of the day. And it is here that mistakes are inked most indelibly into history, whether they relate to suffrage, reform or, most notably in recent years, the debate over Brexit.
The Guardian’s first ever edition – annotated
Mark Rice-Oxley, Theresa Malone , Garry Blight and Miles Probyn (The Guardian, 05/04/2021)
Ads on the front page, news on the back, and a frankly unbelievable story about a ghost: the Manchester Guardian’s first edition on 5 May 1821 is full of gems. We unearth them in this annotated version.