Introduction

Much has been said of the digital turn within journalism, meant to describe the moment when news media began to take advantage of emerging online opportunities at the end of the twentieth century. With the spread of the World Wide Web first in the United States and then in Europe in the 1990s, newspapers started to approach web platforms and their increased functionality, and began to produce news not only for paper, but also for the screen. As they did, the idea of a ‘digital turn’ signalled more than an expansion of publication opportunities. It started a shift in the ways we think about news and media, informed both by what was now possible and what was expected. For newspapers and scholars alike, this introduced a complex set of dynamics that make this a particularly interesting moment in newspapers’ histories. It is also a far less straightforward history than might be assumed, and newspapers which had developed their commercial approaches in the twentieth century making a viable ‘one-to-many’ news product now stepped into an environment where open access, non-commercial experimentation, and interaction were commonplace. To make sense of unique approaches to sharing content now possible online, attention needs to be paid to exploring tensions between these media cultures, including digital cultures and newspapers’ own occupational cultures in order to situate newspapers’ transitions within these broader developments.

To do so, this chapter explores The Guardian's efforts to build an online presence as an exemplar of this transition and its tensions. Archives of its websites and print pages, and accounts of those involved in developing its online spaces, offer insight into how newspapers’ online identities first emerged in this new media space. From these we can also see where these opportunities were fraught with uncertainty. The discussion draws on the earliest archives of guardian.co.uk sites from 1995 to 1998 which, as media artefacts, reflect a range of decisions made by The Guardian. From there, this chapter points to what the digital turn meant for archives and research libraries transitioning from paper towards digitised archives and archives of digital content, and where lessons learned from newspapers’ own transitions have had an effect on the digitisation of archives and archives of digital news. While distinct, each discussion highlights the opportunity and uncertainty that have accompanied the move towards a digital age.