Online Media
The Guardian and its Sunday sibling The Observer publish all their news online, with free access both to current news and an archive of three million stories. A third of the site's hits are for items over a month old. The website also offers G24, a free printable A4 format PDF 24-hour newspaper containing the top stories and, for a monthly subscription, the complete newspaper in PDF format. As of January 2012 it is the second most popular UK newspaper website, behind the Daily Mail's Mail Online, with a daily average of 2,937,070 browsers to the Mail's 4,838,140, and in April 2011 MediaWeek reported that it is the fifth most popular newspaper site in the world.
The Comment is Free section features columns by the paper's journalists and regular commentators, as well as articles from guest writers, with readers comments and responses below. The section includes all the opinion pieces published in the paper itself, as well as many others that only appear online. Censorship is exercised by Moderators who can ban posts – with no right of appeal – by those who they feel have overstepped the mark. The Guardian has taken what they call a very "open" stance in delivering news, and have launched an open platform for their content. This allows external developers to easily use Guardian content in external applications, and even to feed third-party content back into the Guardian network. The Guardian also had a number of talkboards that were noted for their mix of political discussion and whimsy, until they were closed on Friday 25 February 2011. They were spoofed in The Guardian's own regular humorous Chatroom column in G2. The spoof column purported to be excerpts from a chatroom on permachat.co.uk, a real URL which pointed to The Guardian's talkboards.
The paper has also launched a dating website, Soulmates, and is experimenting with new media, having previously offered a free twelve part weekly podcast series by Ricky Gervais. In January 2006 Gervais' show topped the iTunes podcast chart having been downloaded by two million listeners worldwide, and is scheduled to be listed in the 2007 Guinness Book of Records as the most downloaded podcast.
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Famous quotes containing the word media:
“One can describe a landscape in many different words and sentences, but one would not normally cut up a picture of a landscape and rearrange it in different patterns in order to describe it in different ways. Because a photograph is not composed of discrete units strung out in a linear row of meaningful pieces, we do not understand it by looking at one element after another in a set sequence. The photograph is understood in one act of seeing; it is perceived in a gestalt.”
—Joshua Meyrowitz, U.S. educator, media critic. “The Blurring of Public and Private Behaviors,” No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior, Oxford University Press (1985)