Quiet launch for Guardian blog
Posted by
Martin Stabe
on 14 March 2006 at 09:19
Tags: Blogs, Guardian, Journalism
The Guardian quietly made its new comment blog, Comment Is Free, public yesterday evening, a day before the announced launch date.
In post published last night, the blog Pickled Politics was the first to notice that that commentisfree.com no longer leads to the front page of the Guardian web site.
The new blog features a comment piece about blogging by Arianna Huffington, whose Huffington Post has been described as an inspiration for the Guardian site. There are also blog posts by novelist and playwright Ariel Dorfman on Chile’s new president and jounralist Fiona Millar on the education bill.
Comment is Free editor Georgina Henry writes that the blog is being lauched because “it’s obvious to us that our major competition for opinion and debate is moving online, and unless we move with it, we’re failing our journalists and future generations of readers.”
The blog, Henry writes, will be “putting our own writers where their real rivals are”. The Guardian’s hope is that Comment Is Free will help “ensure that the Guardian and Observer remain at the heart of the liveliest liberal-left discourse”, Henry writes, by allowing the papers to engage more with their readers and to do so with more immediacy.
- Update: Tim Wortall takes issue with Huffington’s interpration of who is empowered by blogging.
Tags: Blogs, Guardian, Journalism
