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holdings
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overview
This
profile considers the Guardian Media Group, centred on
the Guardian and the Observer newspapers
in the UK.
It covers -
introduction
The Guardian Media group (GMG) traces its origins to establishment
of the Observer in 1791. It now encompasses national
and local newspaper titles, commercial radio broadcasting
and electronic publishing activity.
GMG had a turnover of £716.1 million in the year
ended 1 April 2007, profit before taxation of £97.7
million and net assets of £533.3 million.
The group is owned by the Scott Trust.
the group
The group currently publishes national daily and weekly
newspapers in the UK and overseas, including the Guardian,
the Observer, Guardian Weekly, Guardian
Europe, Money Observer and Guardian News
Services. Its Regional Newspaper Division comprises the
Manchester Evening News, Manchester Metro
News and City Life, along with over 40 other
paid-for and free titles published from Berkshire, Cheshire,
Greater Manchester, Lancashire and Surrey.
Its Trader Media Group (TMG) publishes over 70 weekly
publications, including Auto Trader, Bike
Trader, Truck Trader and Top Marques.
TMG owns the UK's busiest automotive web site and also
offers interactive services on digital television and
mobile phones. It operates in the UK, Ireland, Netherlands,
Italy and South Africa. Its annual turnover as of 2004
was in excess of £280 million. In March 2007 GMG
announced that it had sold 49.9% of TMG to private equity
group Apax for £674 million. In December 2007 Apax
and GMG paid around £1 billion for Emap's
business-to-business magazine and events arm.
GMG involvement in UK radio commenced in 1999. The group
secured two Real Radio licences in South Wales and Yorkshire
and acquired Scot FM (now Real Radio Scotland) and Jazz
FM licences in London and the north west (Jazz FM north
west is now Smooth FM).
The group's Workthing arm - founded in 2000 and sold in
2004 - provided corporate recruitment solutions.
Learnthings custom-builds educational web materials, with
the Learnpremium e-learning subscription service for schools.
the Guardian
The Guardian was founded as the Manchester
Guardian in 1821 by non-conformist businessmen led
by John Edward Taylor. It became a morning daily in 1855.
The paper's history has been dominated by the figure of
Charles Prestwich Scott (1846-1932), editor for 57 years
from 1872 and an embodiment of High Victorian liberalism
(free trade, cautious franchise reform, principled dissent
about the excesses of imperialism, a meliorist approach
to social reform and an emphasis on personal good works).
Scott acquired the Guardian from the estate of
Taylor's son in 1907.
Although affected by the erosion of Manchester's industrial
base from 1900 onwards, the Guardian gained support
from the left and centre through querstioning of the Boer
War and admirable coverage of the Spanish Civil War. The
Scotts acquired the daily Manchester Evening News
during 1924, pulling the group through the Great Slump,
1939-45 War and Fifties. In 1959 'Manchester' was dropped
from the Guardian's title and in 1964 its editorial base
moved to London.
Emphasis on editorial independence - embodied in ownership
from 1936 by the Scott Trust, discussed below - was reflected
in failure of 1966 talks about a merger with the Times
(which instead became part of Murdoch's
News group) and takeover of the ailing Observer
in 1993. That latter move preempted capture of the Observer
by the The Independent and Independent on
Sunday (which had been strengthened by takeover by
Tony O'Reilly's INM). The Scott Trust's media holdings
were reorganised in 1992 as Guardian Media Group (GMG).
In 1995 GMG became majority shareholder in M&G Media
in South Africa, rebadging the Weekly Mail (an
Independent-inspired title founded 1986) as the
Mail & Guardian. That paper continued to
lose money; GMG transferred most of its stake to Zimbabwean
publisher Trevor Ncube in 2002.
It had meanwhile been acquiring local titles in the UK,
extending its Trader Media Group - with operations in
the UK, Ireland, Netherlands, Italy and South Africa -
and moving back into radio broadcasting after earlier
disposal of radio and television interests. CP Scott had
dismissed early television experimentation with the comment
Television?
The word is half Greek and half Latin. No good will
come of this device
Will
Self sniffed in Feeding Frenzy (New York: Viking
2002) that the Guardian has degenerated into
"little more than the lickspittle house journal of
new Labour" as
a tabloid-broadsheet, a Daily Mail for the
dumbed-down and deracinated, who'd rather read easy-to-swallow
gobbets about Dolce e Gabbana than the kind of serious,
campaigning articles that characterised the paper in
its heyday.
the Evening News and Chronicle
The daily Manchester Evening News was launched
in 1868 by Mitchell Henry as part of his campaign for
election to Parliament. It was sold during that year to
John Edward Taylor, a member of the Guardian's
Taylor family. Taylor subsequently made Peter Allen, his
brother-in-law, a partner in the Evening News
and the Allen family gained control following Taylor's
death in 1907. The Scott family acquired the Evening
News during 1924.
In 1961 the Guardian acquired the daily Manchester
Evening Chronicle from the Berry
family. The Chronicle had been founded in 1897
by Edward Hulton, a former Guardian
employee. In 1963 the Chronicle was merged with
the Evening News as the Manchester Evening
News & Chronicle.
the Observer
The Astors made a fortune from
fur-trading and property (at one stage they were reputed
to be the largest slum landlords in the US). Like Beaverbrook
and Roy Thomson, some members
of the clan gravitated to the UK and gained a peerage
for rescuing newspapers such as the Times (from
the estate of Northcliffe, 'Napoleon
of Fleet Street') and the Observer.
John Jacob Astor migrated to the US in 1783 and became
rich through the American Fur Company, with a fortune
estimated at over US$20 million. Descendant William Waldorf
Astor moved to the UK, where he became a British subject
in 1899. He bought the Pall Mall Gazette, established
the Pall Mall Magazine - the Quadrant of
its day - and funded the Liberal Party, being rewarded
with a peerage. His son Waldorf Astor, who died in 1952,
served as publisher of The Observer (acquired from
the Harmsworths). Waldorf's brother
John Jacob Astor became chief owner of the London Times
in 1922, later acquired by Roy Thomson
and Rupert Murdoch.
In 1977 the Astors sold the ailing Observer to
US oil giant Atlantic Richfield, which flogged it in 1981
to the unsavoury Lonrho under 'Tiny' Rowland. In 1993
the Guardian Media Group bought the paper to preempt a
merger with the Independent on Sunday, now controlled
by O'Reilly.
a different sort of proprietorship
The Guardian group is owned by the Scott Trust, rather
than by a listed company or by a private individual/family.
The Trust was established in 1936 following the death
of CP Scott and Edward Scott (and restructured in 1948
to reflect changes to the UK tax regime). The expectation
was that transfer of ownership to the Trust would prevent
sale or closure of the titles as a result of death duties
and would protect the Guardian's liberal stance from interference
by future press barons.
In 1992 the Trust identified
its central objective as being to
secure
the financial and editorial independence of The
Guardian in perpetuity as a quality national newspaper
without party affiliation; remaining faithful to liberal
tradition; as a profit-seeking enterprise managed in
an efficient and cost-effective manner.
The
Trust formalises the ethos apparent in some family-controlled
media groups - notably the Sulzberger's New York Times
- and is similar to the FAZ Stiftung, the foundation that
controls the Frankfurter Allgemeine
Zeitung.
It has benefitted from advantages under UK taxation law
and, more broadly, from the continued success of the Evening
News and less prominent GMG publications. Similar
mechanisms have failed when the publications that they
controlled lost significant money on an ongoing basis,
for example A-pressen in Norway
and PCM in the Netherlands.
Guardian and Evening News studies
David Ayerst's The Manchester Guardian: Biography
of A Newspaper (Ithaca: Cornell Uni Press 1971), is
essential reading, albeit redolent of Manchester fog and
worthiness. It has been updated by the thinner Changing
Faces: A History of the Guardian (London: Fourth Estate
1993) by Geoffrey Taylor.
Guardian belle lettres is showcased in The Bedside
Years: The Best Writing From the Guardian, 1951-2000
(New York: Atlantic 2002) edited by Matthew Engel. For
an earlier epoch see The Manchester Guardian: a Century
of History (New York: Holt 1922) edited by William
Mills & CP Scott and The Guardian Book of the
Spanish Civil War (Aldershot: Wildwood 1987) edited
by R H Haigh & D S Morris.
The Political Diaries of CP Scott 1911-1928 (London:
Collins 1970) edited by Trevor Wilson is a fascinating
account from Charles Prestwich Scott, Manchester Guardian
editor for 58 years and one of the fathers of what Noel
Annan characterised as 'Our Age'. JL Hammond's disappointingly
reverent CP Scott of the Manchester Guardian
(London: Bell & Sons 1934) and Peter Clarke's Lancashire
and the New Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni
Press 1971) consider the environment. Malcolm Muggeridge's
novel Picture Palace (London: Weidenfeld &
Nicolson 1987) offers a characteristically ungenerous
portrait of Scott. There is a more perceptive analysis
in C.P. Scott, 1846-1932: The Making of the 'Manchester
Guardian' (Westport: Greenwood 1974) by successor
AP Wadsworth.
For a perspective on the Guardian's love-hate
affair with Israel see Daphna Baram's Disenchantment:
the Guardian & Israel (London:
Politico's Publishing 2004).
Observer studies
Richard Cockett's intelligent David Astor & The
Observer (London: Deutsch 1992) complements his Twilight
Of Truth: Chamberlain, Appeasement & The Manipulation
of the Press (New York: St Martins 1989).
Stephen Koss's two volume The Rise & Fall of the Political
Press in Britain (London: Hamish Hamilton 1984) is
essential reading, ideally in conjunction with studies
of status such as David Cannadine's The Decline and
Fall of the British Aristocracy (New Haven: Yale Uni
Press 1990) and Andrew Adonis's Making Aristocracy
Work: The Peerage and the Political System in Britain,
1884-1914 (Oxford:
Oxford Uni Press 1993).
Alfred Gollin's The Observer & JL Garvin (Oxford:
Oxford Uni Press 1960) pictures that newspaper at its
height.
Charles Wintour's The Rise & Fall of Fleet Street
(Hutchinson: London 1989), Northcliffe's Legacy: Aspects
of the British Popular Press 1896-1996 (New York:
St Martins 2000), edited by Peter Catterall & Colin
Seymour-Ure and The Market For Glory (London: Faber
1986) by Simon Jenkins offer perspectives on 'old media'
in the UK during the height of the Astor empire.
Michael Astor's memoir Tribal Feeling (London:
Murray 1963) is very much a period piece. Peter Stanford's
Bronwen Astor: Her Life & Times (London: HarperCollins
2001) is overly respectful to the mystical experiences
of a minor figure in the Profumo Affair, for which we
recommend An Affair Of State: The Profumo Case &
The Framing Of Stephen Ward (New York: Atheneum 1987),
an incisive study by Phillip Knightley & Caroline
Kennedy.
David Astor - humanitarian and friend of Orwell - has
not yet received the biographer that he deserves. He features,
somewhat ungenerously, in Richard Hall's My Life With
Tiny (London: Faber 1987), primarily concerned with
Lonrho's activities in Africa, and in Tom Bower's Tiny
Rowland: A Rebel Tycoon (London: Heinemann 1993).
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