Fonds GUW - Papers relating to the Guardian Weekly

2 boxes

The archive is small and fragmented.It contains editorial notebooks; personal correspondence between readers; and the surveys, memos and reports of staff including Patrick Ensor,Natalie Bennett, Will Ricketts and Alan Rusbridger.

Administrative/Biographical history: The Guardian Weekly, the international edition of the Guardian, was launched a week after the July 1919 Treaty of Versailles concluded the peace agreement between Germany and the Allied powers that ended the first world war. The new paper was intended to extend the reach of the Manchester Guardian, particularly in the United States, and to present “what is best and most interesting in the Guardian, what is most distinctive and independent of time, in a compact form”. The first issues were created with re-used type already set for the daily paper. The Weekly’s initial reception was good, with the majority of sales in the United States.

The Weekly's early editors were typically correspondents who had returned to Manchester from distinguished foreign postings. In 1969, under the editorship of John Perkin, the Guardian Weekly first began to display pictures – often a 'chocolate box' English scene – on its front page. The paper took on a 12,000-strong subscription list from Le Monde's English edition when it folded in 1971, as well as four pages of Le Monde copy used to augment Guardian articles in the Weekly. In 1975, a content deal was also struck with the Washington Post. During Perkin's editorship the Weekly was able to boast Nelson Mandela, then incarcerated in Pollsmoor prison, as one of its readers. Mandela described the paper in his autobiography as a “window on the wider world”.

In 1993, Patrick Ensor took over as editor and oversaw the redesign of the Weekly, which then began to include copy from the Observer for the first time. During his editorship the Guardian Weekly offices also moved from Cheadle, South Manchester, to join the rest of the Guardian on London's Farringdon Road.

Under Ensor, huge shifts in technology changed the production of the paper. In 1991, Perkins had overseen the first transmission of pages to the Australian print site by modem, but Ensor, in London, saw a chance to leapfrog over the Guardian’s first bespoke computer system and employ Quark XPress (desktop publishing software which at that time was used mainly for magazine production). The newspaper, which had been half-broadsheet sized for a large part of its life, became a tabloid. When The Guardian became a 'Berliner' sized paper in 2005, the Guardian Weekly shrunk to a 'half-Berliner'.

Patrick Ensor died in 2007. By this time most subscribers to the Guardian Weekly enjoyed internet access to content. Natalie Bennett was appointed as Ensor’s successor, and her editorship coincided with the Guardian’s move to a digital-first publishing strategy. In 2007 a digital edition of the Weekly was created. An editor’s blog was added to the Weekly’s output, direct feedback was encouraged (not just through the letters page), and a presence on social media sites Facebook and Twitter came soon after. Under Bennett’s leadership the Weekly upped its coverage of environmental issues and the developing world, while de-emphasising its UK and US coverage.

Abby Deveney edited the Guardian Weekly from 2012 to 2017. Under her, the Weekly embraced long-form journalism, with a greater emphasis on insightful writing, deep analysis and lively features. The launch in 2011 of a Guardian US website edited from New York, followed two years later by a Sydney-based Australia digital presence increased the Weekly’s coverage opportunities in those key territories. In 2017, Britain, Australia, the US and Canada were the Weekly’s top markets, followed by New Zealand, France and Germany. With a following in more than 170 countries, the Weekly’s audience is spread around the world.

In October 2018, under the editorship of Will Dean, the Guardian Weekly was relaunched as a news magazine.

The papers have been arranged into the follwoing series, accoridng to their provenance:

GUW/1 - Guardian Weekly Correspondence
GUW/2 - Guardian Weekly materials of editor Patrick Ensor
GUW/3 - Guardian Weekly materials compiled by editor Natalie Bennett
GUW/4 - Guardian Weekly Podcasts