The Guardian Weekly is nearly 100 years old. Ninety-nine in fact. It was introduced during the tenure of CP Scott as a way of sharing the best of the Guardian’s reporting around the world.
Each week since 1919 my predecessors and I – such as John Perkin, Patrick Ensor, Natalie Bennett and Abby Deveney – have been tasked with the rather pleasant job of reading every story produced by the Guardian, and later Observer, during a seven-day period and editing it into one newspaper that gave readers an overview of the week’s news and, as its original mission statement set out, “the best and most interesting” of our journalism.
Of course, that was a somewhat easier task before the advent of the internet. The amount of journalism produced by our UK papers, and US and Australian websites, is far higher than it was in 1919. Even for someone whose job it is essentially to read everything we publish, it is near impossible – let alone for people with proper jobs.
Also tricky is making the news that we put in the Weekly on a Monday evening/Tuesday morning still relevant to readers by the time they receive a copy through their postbox on a Friday. The staff of the Weekly have developed the art of choosing and editing stories so they last for a week – while still giving an overview of world events.
It’s a delicate balancing act, but one that we felt suited a different format, one that would help us to grow the Weekly with readers young and old who may love the experience of print but may have dropped a daily print habit in exchange for online news.
Readers of the Weekly have included US presidents from Jimmy Carter onwards, until George W Bush cancelled the White House direct debit. Nelson Mandela took it in Pollsmoor prison, alongside Time.
When I introduced the new-look magazine to staff during our morning conference last week, our global environment editor Jon Watts told me that when he’d interviewed Sidney Rittenberg, the American revealed that he’d used copies of the Manchester Guardian Weekly to teach English to Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai and other senior Chinese Communist party cadres when they were based in the caves of Yan’an after the Long March.
There’s a lot of history in the Weekly. And one of the first things I learned on the job from Jim Falzarano – a Weekly stalwart of two decades who looks after our letters pages, among other things, is that our readers care extremely deeply about their newspaper. So changing it would be a very big deal.
Many have been subscribing for longer than I have been alive. In fact, one reader our research team met in Toronto had been subscribing for a decade longer than my mother has been alive. So we knew that to change it would likely elicit strong reactions.
We have tried to keep the key elements in the magazine. The new global report section gives readers a brief overview of the week’s headlines in one place. This is followed by our cover story – a package of reporting and analysis of the week’s big story. The issue that hit the newsstands yesterday was led by the apparent murder of Jamal Khashoggi. The rest of the magazine is full of in-depth news reporting as well as the best of the Guardian and Observer’s comment, arts and books coverage.
Going from a 48-page newspaper to a 64-page magazine (with another eight regionalised pages for our Australian and North American editions) was a big challenge for our production team led by Neil Willis and Emily el-Nusairi, alongside editors Graham Snowdon, Isobel Montgomery and Falzarano. The beautiful new look created by designers Chris Clarke and Andrew Stocks is designed to work quickly with the demands of a weekly publication, but any redesign inevitably involves some long nights.
Thankfully we got our first issue to our printers in Oxfordshire, Sydney, New York and Auckland. An editorial decision to swap an image in one of our in-house adverts three minutes before the deadline nearly gave our publisher Mylene Sylvestre a heart attack, but we got out on time and, within a day or so, the Weekly was in people’s homes and on the newsstand, not with the papers but alongside the magazines.
The big test was what our readers would make of it. The vast majority of feedback has been positive and our arrival on UK newsstands have been rewarded with a sell-out.
“A very pleasing change. It is not often that change takes place for the better,” wrote Eddie van Rijnswoud from Western Australia, pleasingly.
Others were less keen. “Today, a red glossy comic arrived in my German letter box. I was appalled,” said Liz Brockschmidt in Tecklenburg.
One reader wrote to me suggesting I had “destroyed an icon”, never a charge an editor should take lightly – and we will of course be listening to readers’ concerns over the next few weeks. But, in the meantime, subscription number are up hugely, and hopefully even those readers shocked by the look will begin to forgive me.
The Weekly has come a long way. From newsprint to airmail paper, back to newsprint – and from print sites in post-war Germany to South Africa and beyond. The reason it is a success is because readers around the world love Guardian journalism in print. I hope that as a magazine we will give them the chance to do so for another 99 years.
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