Three weeks ago I wrote about your response to the Guardian’s coverage of the terrorist attacks on the US and their aftermath, pointing out the huge increase in demand for news and analysis not just from within the United Kingdom but from all over the world through our network of websites.
In normal times 600r a little over, of those of you who read the Guardian online do so from the UK and 40 0.000000rom other parts of the world. The precise statistics, from the last survey are: 620K; 130ther European countries; 120S and 130ther parts of the world.
These figures, however, date from May this year and the new ones which will result from a survey beginning on Monday are likely to show a significant difference, particularly in the number using the website from the US. Our calculations suggest we now have more than half a million regular readers in the US.
The use of the website in September was unprecedented, with 44m page impressions – an increase on our main news site of 74% – and 3.7m “unique users”, individuals counted once no matter how many times they used the site during the month. As many as 140f those may have been in the US.
In my earlier column (September 22) I wrote that this wider audience did not necessarily share the paper’s liberal principles. I dwelt rather on the adverse criticism that our coverage attracted, especially when critical of US foreign policy or providing a platform for voices from the Muslim world.
It is just this breadth of coverage, however, that many of you outside the UK, including many Americans, have been turning to the website for. Let me quote one or two of you who felt that the Guardian was providing a range of comment unavailable in your own media. From Massachusetts: “I am an American who fears, more than any terrorist, the apparently fierce determination among many Americans to remain ignorant about what lay behind this tragedy . . .”; from Hawaii: “You have somehow escaped the biases of the American press . . .”; from New York: “You help me sift through the smoke and soot fanned by America’s media, their shrill jingoism, and [help me] to preserve my sanity”; from Los Angeles: “Most of the US media tends to be rather shallow . . . word of mouth has a fair number of people who work for the film studios here perusing your site.” I have a great many more similar emails, not all from the US – from Canada, Mexico, Japan, Australia (a reader who complained of being Murdochised), Germany, Italy.
Some readers who clearly visited the site for coverage of the crisis wrote in praise of other things they found there. One reader particularly appreciated our coverage of religious affairs and the weekly Face to Faith articles: “I live in a very small town in Kentucky, surrounded by radical fundamentalism. There is absolutely no one here to talk with about such modern ideas and interpretations.”
We have yet to appreciate the full significance to the paper of this great extension of the Guardian’s readership, a readership able to receive the news and make its views felt immediately. At present those of you visiting the site have little indication that you are part of this international community of readers.
A sprinkling of your comments finds its way into the letters page of the main paper (which is also available on the website), while many of your emails are circulated to relevant individual correspondents and editors. But, apart from the talkboards, which do not always sustain their discussions at, let us say, the highest level, there is no website forum for your views comparable with the paper’s greatly oversubscribed letters page. Letters from website users outside the UK represent a resource of potentially great value and interest which is at present untapped.
The editor-in-chief of Guardian Unlimited says that on her appointment before the present crisis, she perceived the absence of such a forum as a gap and is in the process of changing the situation. By early next year your views should have proper representation there. “We want to show that you can get intelligent debate on a website,” she says.
The editor of the Guardian says he is all for that. He does not see the huge email response from beyond the UK as a pressure on the paper or its liberal values, and certainly not a threat to them. It demonstrates, he says, that the widest possible selection of views which the Guardian disseminates is being amplified throughout the world. “Many Arabs and Muslims are astonished at what they read. I love that thought.”
A final word from the editor: “I suppose that once you are aware of this international dimension you can’t help but think a little more internationally and be a little less anglocentric.”
