The Guardian: Digital First, Newspaper Second

The Guardian, one of the most highly respected newspapers in the UK today announced that it wants to become a “digital-first” organization and shift its “focus, effort and investment towards digital.” Newspapers have long struggled to adapt to an environment where printed newspapers are slowly becoming irrelevant due to faster news cycles and the availability to thousands of free online news sources. The Guardian hopes that this major organizational change will allow it to remain at the forefront of what its CEO Andrew Miller likes to call “open journalism” that puts an emphasis on “editorial content which is collaborative, linked into and networked with the rest of the web.”

The Guardian’s parent organization Guardian News & Media also plans to expands its organization in the U.S. and to offer new mobile services soon. To finance this shift, the Guardian will move resources away from print and into digital. The printed paper, though, will remain part of the company’s portfolio for now, but today’s announcement also hinted at a possible move towards an evening edition instead of the current morning edition. Print, according to the U.K.-based press trade publication Press Gazette, currently accounts for about a fifth of the Guardian’s annual revenue, but income from print has been declining quickly over the last few years as circulation continues to drop.