Online Media
The Guardian and its Sunday sibling The Observer publish all their news online, with free access both to current news and an archive of three million stories. A third of the site's hits are for items over a month old. The website also offers G24, a free printable A4 format PDF 24-hour newspaper containing the top stories and, for a monthly subscription, the complete newspaper in PDF format. As of January 2012 it is the second most popular UK newspaper website, behind the Daily Mail's Mail Online, with a daily average of 2,937,070 browsers to the Mail's 4,838,140, and in April 2011 MediaWeek reported that it is the fifth most popular newspaper site in the world.
The Comment is Free section features columns by the paper's journalists and regular commentators, as well as articles from guest writers, with readers comments and responses below. The section includes all the opinion pieces published in the paper itself, as well as many others that only appear online. Censorship is exercised by Moderators who can ban posts – with no right of appeal – by those who they feel have overstepped the mark. The Guardian has taken what they call a very "open" stance in delivering news, and have launched an open platform for their content. This allows external developers to easily use Guardian content in external applications, and even to feed third-party content back into the Guardian network. The Guardian also had a number of talkboards that were noted for their mix of political discussion and whimsy, until they were closed on Friday 25 February 2011. They were spoofed in The Guardian's own regular humorous Chatroom column in G2. The spoof column purported to be excerpts from a chatroom on permachat.co.uk, a real URL which pointed to The Guardian's talkboards.
The paper has also launched a dating website, Soulmates, and is experimenting with new media, having previously offered a free twelve part weekly podcast series by Ricky Gervais. In January 2006 Gervais' show topped the iTunes podcast chart having been downloaded by two million listeners worldwide, and is scheduled to be listed in the 2007 Guinness Book of Records as the most downloaded podcast.
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Famous quotes containing the word media:
“Today the discredit of words is very great. Most of the time the media transmit lies. In the face of an intolerable world, words appear to change very little. State power has become congenitally deaf, which is why—but the editorialists forget it—terrorists are reduced to bombs and hijacking.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)