Guardian News and Media will scrap its international print editions later this year as part of its new ‘digital first’strategy.
In an announcement made today the company said the last international editions of The Guardian and The Observer – which are printed at five sites in New York, Frankfurt, Madrid, Malta and Cyprus – will be published on 1 October 2011.
Four jobs are under threat as a result of the move but GNM said it hopes to redeploy them into other areas of the company.
GNM executive director (commercial) Adam Freeman said: “Our international print editions have been a valued part of what we do for a number of years, but as a result of the structural changes affecting all printed newspapers we have been steadily reducing the amount of copies we publish outside the UK since 2010 due to reasons of demand and cost.
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‘We will continue to serve our growing international audience via our website and other digital platforms and we will also increase the distribution of Guardian Weekly.”
Freeman claimed this was one of a number of steps the company was taking to focus on ‘digital platforms and subscription-based products”.
Writing for the July edition of Press Gazette magazine, The Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger said betting the future of the paper on print would have been ‘truly reckless”, and admitted more needed to be done to cut costs out of the business.
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Rusbridger announced the company’s ‘digital first’strategy on 15 June, when he told staff that GNM would ‘move beyond the newspaper, shifting focus, effort and investment towards digital, because that is our future”.
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