The Guardian (until 1959, The Manchester Guardian) is a British newspaper owned by the Guardian Media Group. It is published Monday to Saturday in the Berliner format from its London and Manchester headquarters.

The Guardian Weekly, which circulates worldwide, provides a compact digest of four newspapers. It contains articles from The Guardian and its Sunday, sister paper The Observer, as well as reports, features and book reviews from The Washington Post and articles translated from France's Le Monde.

The Guardian had a certified average daily circulation of 358,844 copies in January 2009 a drop of 5.17% on January 2008, as compared to sales of 842,912 for The Daily Telegraph, 617,483 for The Times, and 215,504 for The Independent.

The Guardian Media Group also runs a website, guardian.co.uk.

Stance and editorial opinion

Editorial articles in The Guardian are generally to the left of the political spectrum. This is reflected in the paper's readership: a MORI poll taken between April and June 2000 showed that 80% of Guardian readers were Labour Party voters; according to another MORI poll taken in 2005, 48% of Guardian readers were Labour voters and 34% Liberal Democrat voters.

The newspaper's reputation as a platform for liberal opinions has led to the use—sometimes pejorative—of the phrase "Guardian reader" as a label for people holding such opinions.

Founded by textile traders and merchants, The Guardian had a reputation as "an organ of the middle class", or in the words of C.P. Scott's son Ted "a paper that will remain bourgeois to the last". "I write for the Guardian," said Sir Max Hastings in 2005, "because it is read by the new establishment", reflecting the paper's growing influence.

1821 to 1959

The Manchester Guardian was founded in Manchester in 1821 by a group of non-conformist businessmen headed by John Edward Taylor, who took advantage of the closure of the more radical Manchester Observer, the paper that had championed the cause of the Peterloo protesters. Taylor had been hostile to the radical reformers, writing:

quote: they have appealed not to the reason but the passions and the suffering of their abused and credulous fellow-countrymen, from whose ill-requited industry they extort for themselves the means of a plentiful and comfortable existence. “The do not toil, nether do they spin,” but they live better than those that do.

And when the government closed down the Manchester Observer, the mill-owners' champions had the upper hand. The prospectus announcing the new publication proclaimed that it would "zealously enforce the principles of civil and religious Liberty ... warmly advocate the cause of Reform ... endeavour to assist in the diffusion of just principles of Political Economy and ... support, without reference to the party from which they emanate, all serviceable measures".