Ian Mayes, the Guardian readers' editor, wrote (17 July):
According to NewsKnife the Guardian was the world's most popular news source on Google News (an automatic search of 4,500 news sites) for the six months to the end of June this year. In that time Google News brought about 2m referrals. The Google search engine in the UK and US over the same period brought about 14 million people to the Guardian. A site called Technorati, which shows the most preferred links among bloggers, recently had the Guardian as the sixth most popular site in the world.
A week before, Mayes had written about the changes the paper is about to undergo: in format ("midi" shape), further re-design, introduction of newer technology, etc. The 'most significant but most difficult to predict element' of change is 'the future relationship and degree of integration of the paper and the web. Where the total sales of quality newspapers in Britain are in slow decline, use of the internet has soared, closely paralleled by Guardian Unlimited. The editor said: "For hundreds of thousands of people the Guardian is the website." '
In the past five years the number of page impressions - separate pages opened by readers - has risen from fewer than 10m a month to more than 100m with, for example, some 9 million unique users (separate individuals) arriving at the Guardian website in June this year. It has become one of the world's leading newspaper-based websites, far ahead of any other newspaper website in the UK, and in the US second only to the BBC among favoured UK news sites. ...In fact, a geographical locating system now used by the Guardian makes it possible to say that Guardian readers are literally all over the world, in more than 180 different countries on an average day. It is roughly right to say that the Guardian has more readers in the US than it has in the UK. Last month more than 3.5 million people across the US visited the site, compared with just over 2 million in the UK, although the latter are generally more avid, opening more than twice the number of pages looked at by US readers. To take one recent day, June 21, visitors to the site came from 185 countries. The most represented were: US, UK, Canada, Australia, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Japan, Spain and Ireland. At the other end of the list were the Cook Islands (eight recorded users), Tajikistan (seven), Andorra (seven), Somalia (seven), Togo (seven), Bhutan (five), Equatorial Guinea (five), Suriname (three), Lesotho (two), with just one user noted that day in the British Indian Ocean Territory (the Chagos archipelago) ...
It means, to paraphrase Shakespeare, that the Guardian puts a girdle round about the earth in rather less than Puck's 40 minutes. Mistakes travel similarly far and fast, which makes correcting them even more important. In a recent online survey conducted by the Guardian, 89% of the 1,200 respondents answered "yes" to the question: "On balance do you trust editorial coverage on Guardian Unlimited?" And 98% of the respondents were aware that the website was part of the Guardian and Observer newspaper group, based in the UK. (In a separate survey of Guardian newspaper readers, 59% were aware of the readers' editor, and of those 76% felt the paper was becoming more responsive).
The editor again: "It is clear that the Guardian is becoming the English language global liberal voice. It has earned an incredibly high degree of trust. That means that today's journalists have a much bigger influence than any previous generation of Guardian writers. The bigger the internet becomes and the more voices there are on it, the more important it is to have a voice that is recognisable, truthful and reliable."
The director of digital publishing sees the Guardian of the future as part of a global information community whose members interact with the Guardian and with each other with a frequency we have barely begun to imagine.
