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The Guardian Front Cover analysis - Hard/soft news

The Guardian prior research

7/1/20       The Guardian prior research – Ownership, journalism and target audience 

  

The Guardian – The Guardian is a slimline tabloid newspaper – adopting its style previously from being a Berliner; a hybrid between a broadsheet and a tabloid. The Guardian is a subsidiary of The Guardian Media Group, which is owned by the Scott Trust Limited. The Scott Trust is the sole shareholder of the Guardian Media Group, which publishes theguardian.com and the Guardian and the Observer. This means that all of the resourced belong to the trust, but it delegates the operational running of the business to the Guardian Media Group board which invest that money into their newspapers and website and then in any other business designed to bring in income, increase capital value or help in some other way to develop the company. The trust never distributes a dividend, but ploughs profits back into the business. The trust has important responsibilities – it appoints the editor-in-chief and the chair of the GMG board, and has the right to see and know anything about the business – but its impact is more subtle and harder to pin down. The trust is responsible for appointing the editor of The Guardian but also has a policy of not interfering in their decisions. The trust ensures that the priority for the whole business is the journalism.  

 

As seen by yougov.com, The Guardian’s significant primary audience are millennials. These milennials are frequently culturally, politically and socially engaged ABS1s. This therefore means that The Guardian, in order to fulfill their needs, must report stories that have current political/cultural significance. The readers are often well-educated, so the journalism may be more complex/aimed at someone of intelligence than stories reported in The Daily mail. The Guardian covers a wide range of topics; common topics include food, politics and entertainment. The Guardian is known to have a left-leaning political affiliation. This is reflected in the newspaper’s liberal journalism. This is viewpoint is reflected in their journalism. For example, The Guardian were anti-Brexit, adopting a similar view to that of the UK Labour party, and they quite often write in favour of the rights of ethnic minorities, adopting a sympathetic view of refugees, opposing the dominant viewpoint that the Daily Mail adopts. The Guardian position themselves as the only newspaper that tells the whole truth about issues.