‘A crazy act of will’: The Guardian Australia turns one
The Guardian this week celebrates the first anniversary of its Australian operation. Launch editor Katharine Viner and some of her team talk to Nic Christensen to discuss the publication’s place in Australia’s media landscape.
It was over breakfast at the Edinburgh Media Festival, in August of 2012, that Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger first raised the idea of moving his deputy editor out to Australia to launch a digital offshoot of the UK newspaper.
“I said to him: ‘No, it’s far too far away’,” Katharine Viner reveals, as we sit in her Sydney office in Surry Hills, some 16 months into her stint as launch editor and editor-in-chief of the Guardian Australia.
Inspiring success story – congratulations to all those who put so much work in to make it work.
Note how little post-election audience that the Guardian retained in 4th quarter of 2013. This was due to a plethora of campaign coverage of the same old trivial stunt events, gaffes, and farcically superficial analysis of party policies. There was one whole day wasted with the top story being an egregiously feckless robo-poll, contracted by the Guardian, that predicted Rudd and Swann were highly likely to lose their seats.
I read literally hundreds of comments from their readers begging the Guardian political journalists to at least explore, not even to expose, significant matters. Instead, they continued mocking the campaign as a circus, as though afterward we’d all just have a good laugh at how silly it all was since what did it matter anyway who won government. Well, nobody but the billionaire “Australian” newspaper’s owner and its well-off readership is laughing now.
If the Guardian wants to retain a loyal audience, then the recent reporting of Whitehouse Design School is how to go about it. We don’t need more Fairfax/ABC News superficiality and false equivalence. As an example, look at how MSNBC has created a loyal audience when it stopped churning out the same meaningless, lazy genre of journalism as CNN’s.
I’d watch out Mumbrella, from the fawning tone of this write-up “she replies without the hubris such a statement might imply” I think Nic might be angling for a job over there.
or I genuinely mean what I say @David, confusing eh?
Someone please tell Ian that Unique Audience and Unique Browsers are very different metrics so I sure hope that they ARE different.
Pssst,
Very aware of the differences; but when talking about growth, UA only tells half the story (UA is based on a desktop only panel). Hence the use of other metrics such as UBs, to give a fuller picture.
One of the Guardian people is on the phone, when the photo is taken, look on right
He is, 24/7 journalism in action right there…even for a shoot these professionals never switch off…no wonder they are doing so bloody well and are so good!
That audience growth is terrible given the investment. I actually believe the UK would be viewing this as not meeting expectations.
Interesting that everyone talks about the success.
The numbers don’t reflect that.
Everyone is in it “for the long haul” right up to the point where they pull the plug. That said, I read the /uk and the /au editions, and I think the experiment has worked, and I wish them every success and continuance.
I miss the guardian weekly. Not the last one, the first one printed on airmail grade paper. It was a gem. You got the news too late to get heated, and in sufficient depth to feel informed.
I’m with jj
I’d have thought the reason they’ve done well is obvious – the colossal blackhole in the Australian market of anything that’s not Murdoch.
Really, the strange story isn’t that they came here…..it’s that it took so bloody long for the world to realise how the Australian market was actually crying out for papers not exclusively written for aged conservative and exclusively white audiences. They should have figured that out in the 90s sometime…it took this long. Amazing if you think about it.
C’est un vrai plaisir de lire votre poste