In an interview to mark 200 years of The Guardian, editor Katharine Viner spoke to Press Gazette about the secret of its longevity.
The Guardian enters its third century in a secure financial position (with just under £1bn in the bank and sustainable losses running at £10-20m annually). And while print circulation continues to decline (to just over 100,000 copies per day), it claims more than 1m paying readers and is the sixth biggest news website in the world with 317m website visits in March 2021.
PG: Congratulations on 200 years in print. What do you think is the secret to The Guardian’s success?
Posted by Sophia Cao | Mar 31, 2007
…Here in Mai, a village in Guangdong Province, southern China, a community of recyclers ekes out a living from items considered so worthless in the west that they are given away free and quickly discarded. Carrier bags and bottles are shipped here from London, Rotterdam, Hong Kong and cities within China for chopping, melting and remoulding into pellets. Like many jobs outsourced to China, it’s dirty, smelly, labour-intensive and poorly paid.
There is so much rubbish to be recycled that parts of the village look like a dump. “The river is foul – we can smell it from our classrooms,” says Wang Yanxia, a student at a local middle school. “When it rains, the water floods on to the path and the stench is everywhere.” Villagers may not have heard of Tesco, but the British high street giant has an all too visible presence. One factory has even decorated its front gates with huge plastic banners advertising a Tesco mobile phone offer….[F