The Guardian Moves to .com Domain
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
There are a few independent online news services but having the Guardian start an Australian branch is a welcome boost to democracy here. Visiting the Australian sub-site on a co.uk domain wasn't all that attractive for a country that has been independent since federation. So well done everyone at The Guardian.
It also seems a bit premature, why not wait for guardian.news?
At least, I don't think that The Guardian is going to ditch it any time soon - too much SEO & incoming links to the old tld to lose if they do.
curl -I http://www.theguardian.co.uk/politics/2013/jul/30/clegg-go-home-illegal-immigrants-campaign
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
<snip>
Location: http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/jul/30/clegg-go-home-illegal-immigrants-campaign
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/jul/30/clegg-go-home-illegal-immigrants-campaign" />'Obvious' in the sense that they publicly announced they were going to do it, did it, and talked about having done it.. yes.
On a related note, I have always disliked the fact that UK TLD disallows use of .uk, instead lumped with the crappy .co.uk.
Nominet have already floated the idea of opening up .UK for top level registration [1]. It wouldn't surprise me at all if they try and milk the market for topical 2LDs either.
I actually think it's a bad idea. Keeping a ccTLDs level reserved seems sensible to me. For instance, only UK Limited companies are allowed to register .ltd.uk domains.
[1] http://www.nominet.org.uk/how-participate/policy-development...
It's still on their homepage (pink "Consultation" box) and the wording is "revised proposals". Worryingly they're also looking at introducing residency checks for individual registrations.
It's just a matter of reserving those domains.
I'll phone my representative, maybe he can sneak this in as a rider to a 2,000 page bill about abortion or gay marriage or funding the terrorists in Syria that nobody read.
they had two domain names that they seem to put together under a single one. That seems to be a logical move.
http://www.theguardian.com/gnm-press-office/guardian-us-grow...
The latest big news was about Snowden, hardly qualifies as a uk news ;)
All American businesses use .com. Some non-American businesses do too, but it's first and foremost the "business" TLD for American businesses, just as .gov is used by the American government, and .org is loosely used for many types of American organizations.
In hindsight, doing .us.co or .us.com would have made a lot of sense. But hindsight is 20/20, and that's simply not what happened.
"... on May 6, the Penny Black became the world's first postage stamp in use.
The stamp was originally for use only within the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and as such was in effect initially a local stamp. For this reason the name of the country was not included within the design, a situation which continued by agreement with foreign post offices, provided the sovereign's effigy appeared on the stamp. Envelopes sold with postage paid did not include this, so were marked with the country's name. In 1951, the special commemorative issue for the Festival of Britain included the name "Britain" incidentally. It could therefore be said that the name of the country then appeared for the first time on a stamp of the UK, although the word "British" had appeared on British Empire Exhibition commemorative stamps of 1924."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postage_stamps_and_postal_hist...
I have no idea why Americans are so phobic about shipping abroad. It can't be a service issue, on that front one would expect exactly the opposite.
Guardian has been making a loss for years [1] in the difficult UK market, it's future is as an international orientated news source. I want them to stick around so I welcome the expansion.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Guardian (search "loss")
(aside: the majority of voters for all three of the big parties in the UK read the Daily Mail, of them that read a print newspaper.)
It says the Daily Mail has a circulation of about 1.8m daily, the Guardian has a circulation of about 200k daily. The Sun is the most widely bought newspaper, at 2.4m daily, but they're all declining across the board.
The Mail hasn't had daily sales over 4 million this millennium. But since you apparently overestimate the guardians sales by 100% too I guess the point you're making still stands.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_newspapers_in_the_Unite...
Sales figures obviously give a much more concrete number for comparing paper to paper, but if you're trying to make a comparison to TV viewers or some other type of media maybe the readership numbers are more meaningful.
That is not to say that it wouldn't like to make a profit. But it doesn't 'need to' to survive as its money is generated by its parent company Guardian News & Media which is then plowed back in the paper and the trust. GNM does very nicely. Until relatively recently it owned the UK arm of AutoTrader. It also owns a lot of local talk radio stations and newspapers which turn a tidy profit. The irony is that many of these sources are more closely aligned politically to the Daily Mail that the Guardian.
The Guardian is extremely sociliast in its reporting. That's just not popular. You're not going to make any profit with that political viewpoint. (Although you'll certainly be popular on Reddit, the BBC, and other left leaning communities).
To make money, you need to be center / center right to appeal to most people. That's why newspapers like "The Sun" and "Daily Mail" absolutely dwarf "The Gruaniad" in readership.
If anything, to me it smacks of hypocracy rather than irony. It would be like a campaign setup to promote vegetarianism, bankrolled by a side venture selling beef burgers.
The tabloid equivalent of a left newspaper (though the terms make much less sense since the tabloids aren't nearly as political) would be the Daily Mirror, and it more than holds its own in the circulation wars.
The relative popularity of the Sun and the Daily Mail is best explained by Jim Hacker and friends: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGscoaUWW2M&t=1m0s
In other words, a classical broadsheet vs. tabloid situation. Politics doesn't sell as well as gossip and T&A.
When I used to buy papers a few times a week, I rotated the Guardian, The Independent and the Telegraph.
If you went outside the news articles the Guardian was foaming at its mouth, agenda crazy leftie. The editors, opinions and letters pages were filled with rubbish. Far more than the Telegraph was politely right wing.
Perhaps they've toned it down since focusing online, but though I don't read the site I still come across op pieces linked in various places that show otherwise.
Generally I've not seen this handled gracefully
When I worked at BBC News we split the site into "UKFS" (uk facing site) and "IFS" (international facing site) but let readers pick via cookie which they wanted.
Since I left they changed it to always set to your region, which is always frustrating.