Company Summary
Guardian Media Group (GMG) is one of the UK’s leading media organisations and exists to support quality, independent, liberal journalism. Its core business is Guardian News & Media, which publishes the Guardian and the Observer newspapers and the theguardian.com website.
GMG is wholly owned by The Scott Trust – a private company and the sole shareholder in GMG. The Scott Trust was founded in 1936 and exists to secure the financial and editorial independence of The Guardian in perpetuity. The shareholders of The Scott Trust take no dividend from the business and all of GMG’s profits are reinvested to support the Trust’s core purpose. The Trust has a strongly held set of values which guide the business conduct of GMG.
Key Facts
theguardian.com regularly reaches over 150 million unique browsers on a monthly basis
The Guardian has operations in the UK, US and Australia
In a 2017 Ofcom study, The Guardian was rated as the most trusted online news source in the UK
Guardian history
The first edition of The Manchester Guardian was published on 5 May 1821 under the editorship of John Edward Taylor. In 1907, the legendary editor C.P. Scott took ownership of the paper and established the Manchester Guardian Ltd., now the Guardian Media Group.
In 1959 the newspaper changed its name to The Guardian, removing the reference to Manchester from its masthead to reflect the breadth of its readership and coverage.
In 1993 the Guardian Media Group adopted its current name and acquired the Observer, the world’s oldest Sunday newspaper, as a sister paper to The Guardian. Two years later The Guardian introduced its first website and in 1999 the series of sites that followed were united to form Guardian Unlimited, the predecessor to today’s theguardian.com. For more information on the history of the Guardian’s digital developments see the timeline of key moments in the Guardian’s history.
