As the Guardian celebrates its 200th birthday, Lenore Taylor reflects on how Guardian Australia transplanted the progressive values of its global parent company to change the fabric of Australian media
Last modified on Thu 6 May 2021 03.32 AEST
Milestone birthdays are times for reflection, for assessing achievements and charting the path ahead. Reflecting on 200 years of Guardian journalism would be easier done from a place of calm, rather than from newsrooms reporting and comprehending a deathly, history-changing pandemic.
But the news is seldom calm, and, as our editor-in-chief Katharine Viner reflects in this essay to mark the Guardian’s bicentennial, our path forward is charted by the same principles that have guided us through those two centuries of reporting on wars and massacres and corruption and inequities and moments of progress and triumph.
We report for the powerless and the people subjected to the exercise of power, not in the interests of those who wield it. We seek to listen and understand the experience of our readers and help them make sense of the world as it is. And we try to help consider how we can act to create a better one. That is what we mean when we say we are progressive.
It’s this editorial purpose that informed our reporting of the pandemic and it will govern how we try to understand the ways the world has been transformed and how we shape the memory of this catastrophe. And our purpose will provide the plumb line for how we analyse and imagine rebuilding from this collective trauma in a way that makes our communities better able to face the challenges we know are to come.
We launched in May 2013, a tiny startup impatient to make a mark in a country where the news was dominated by two big media companies and a public broadcaster under constant political pressure, and in spite of the fact the digital giants were at that very time upending the traditional news company’s revenue streams.
I have written before about that leap into the unknown. At the time Guardian Australia was a handful of staff, guided by the enthusiasm of Katharine Viner, our first Australian editor, and our absolute determination to make a difference.
Eight years on, and five years after I took over as Guardian Australia’s first Australian editor, we can say, without hesitation, that we have made a difference.
We are read by millions of Australians, we are expanding and we are profitable, thanks in large part to the loyalty and generosity of our readers. Our reporting has influenced the national debate on the climate emergency, on the treatment of asylum seekers, on Indigenous issues, on the environment, on welfare policy and on politics. The Australian discourse is broader and deeper and sharper because we are here.
In Australia, coronavirus arrived just as our newsroom was drawing breath after an exhausting, terrifying summer reporting on the bushfire crisis. We asserted, contrary to some of our competitors, that this disaster was in fact a frontline in the fast-approaching climate emergency. Through that black summer and the long months of the pandemic, readers grasped for trustworthy factual news from all media organisations as they faced upheaval and uncertainty in their own lives and watched the horror unfolding around the world. We found new ways to reach them and learn from them about the impact of coronavirus. We brought them the depth and perspective of the Guardian’s global reporting and every necessary prosaic detail needed to navigate their lives at home.
The pandemic has changed much, but our values remain the same. They are the deep roots of a 200-year-old organisation that nourish our young Australian operation. We report for Australia, but we are part of something bigger – a global parent company and the big foundational idea of independent journalism, beholden to nothing except the pursuit of the truth. Our 200th birthday catchcry is “we’ve only just begun”. In Australia, eight years in, that is equally true.
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