Guardian Unlimited
"Guardian Unlimited" is a British website owned by the Guardian Media Group. It contains nearly all of the content of the newspapers The Guardian and The Observer, as well as a substantial body of web-only work produced by its own staff, including a rolling news service.
Popularity
It is Britain's most popular newspaper website (2.5m unique UK visitors in September 2005 - 73% more than the nearest competitor [1]), and one of the most popular news resources on the Internet. For example, on 7 July 2005, following the 7 July London bombings, a record 1.3 million unique users visited the site and a total of 7.8 million pages were viewed [2] (nb link requires registration). Interestingly, there were more visitors from the United States than from the United Kingdom.
Content
The site is made up of a core news site, plus a network of niche websites covering subjects including media, sport, education and the public sector. "Guardian Unlimited" is notable for its engagement with readers, including long-running talkboards and, more recently, a network of weblogs. Its seven blogs were joined on March 14, 2006 by a new comment site, Comment is free, named after the famous quote by the Guardian editor, C. P. Scott.
Both the talkboards and blogs accept comments without pre-moderation, although Comment is free requires registration for comments. Most of the site can be viewed for free and without registration, though some services such as[Guardian Unlimited Talk and its media industry news site require users to register.
Ownership
"Guardian Unlimited" is part of the Guardian Media Group of newspapers, radio stations, and new media including The Guardian daily newspaper, The Observer Sunday newspaper, and the Manchester Evening News. All the aforementioned are owned by The Scott Trust, a charitable foundation which aims to ensure the newspaper's editorial independence in perpetuity, maintaining its financial health to ensure it does not become vulnerable to take over by for-profit media groups, and the serious compromise of editorial independence that this often brings.
History
"Guardian Unlimited" was launched in 1999, born of the Guardian New Media Lab. Its popularity soared after the September 11th attacks in the United States, largely thanks to the diverse range of viewpoints published in the Guardian newspaper. The website won the Best Newspaper category in the 2005 Webby Awards, beating the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal and Variety. [3].
In 2005 "Guardian Unlimited" had its first profitable year, income coming mostly from recruitment and display advertising. [4]
External links
- Guardian Unlimited
- Guardian Front Page RSS feed (in XML; use a news aggregator)
- Digital Guardian
- Guardian Unlimited blogs
- The Guardian Unlimited Talk Board