After The Sydney Morning Herald turned 190 on April 19th, The Guardian blows out the candles for its 200th birthday.
To celebrate, The Guardian are running their first digital festival, billed as “a mix of conversations about politics, activism, the environment, TV, music and more – brought to you, wherever you are in the world.”
The festival will be streamed on May 11th local time from Manchester, UK in honour of the fact that it was founded in 1821 as The Manchester Guardian by John Edward Taylor, the son of a cotton merchant. He set the paper up with financial backing from cotton and textile traders. The full lineup can be seen here.
Editors from around the world have given tributes to the paper on its anniversary.
Dean Baquet, executive editor, The New York Times said “There are many great things that can be said about the Guardian. But to me what it accomplished is becoming a truly great investigative paper willing to take on the most ambitious subjects – big government, big tech, the surveillance state. It forced us all to lift our game and it made us all better.”
Fran Unsworth, director, BBC News said “The Guardian’s history is a rich tapestry of investigative journalism, holding power to account and putting their readers at the forefront of everything they do. 200 years is an extraordinary achievement and a tribute to the enduring value of high-quality journalism that adds to the broad spectrum of views across the national conversation.”
Today The Guardian has US offices in New York, Washington and Oakland, California, and even more offices overseas. Guardian Australia launched in May 2013, and as Lenore Taylor writes, “as a startup in a country where the news was dominated by two big media companies and a public broadcaster under constant political pressure, and in spite of the fact the digital giants were at that very time upending the traditional news company’s revenue streams.”