Guardian Media Group

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Guardian Media Group plc is a company of the United Kingdom owning various mass media operations including The Guardian, The Observer and the Manchester Evening News. The Group is owned by the Scott Trust. It was founded as the Manchester Guardian Ltd in 1907 when C. P. Scott bought the Manchester Guardian from the estate of his cousin Edward Taylor. It became the Manchester Guardian and Evening News Ltd when it bought out the Manchester Evening News in 1924, later becoming the Guardian and Manchester Evening News Ltd to reflect the change in the morning paper's title. It adopted its current name in 1993. Its current chief executive is Carolyn McCall, formerly Chief Executive of Guardian News and Media Limited and a non executive director of Tesco and chair of Opportunity Now.

1 GuardianFilms
2 Radio
3 Group assets
4 Board of directors
5 References
6 External links

In 2003, The Guardian started GuardianFilms, headed by award-winning journalist Maggie O'Kane. Much of the company's output is documentary made for television – and it has included Salam Pax's Baghdad Blogger for BBC Two's daily flagship Newsnight, some of which have been shown in compilations by CNN International, Sex On The Streets and Spiked, both made for the UK's Channel 4 television.[1]

' GuardianFilms was born in a sleeping bag in the Burmese rainforest,' wrote O'Kane in 2003.[2] 'I was a foreign correspondent for the paper, and it had taken me weeks of negotiations, dealing with shady contacts and a lot of walking to reach the cigar-smoking Karen twins - the boy soldiers who were leading attacks against the country's ruling junta. After I had reached them and written a cover story for the newspaper's G2 section, I got a call from the BBC's documentary department, which was researching a film on child soldiers. Could I give them all my contacts?

'The plight of the Karen people, who were forced into slave labour in the rainforest to build pipelines for oil companies (some of them British), was a tale of human suffering that needed to be told by any branch of the media that was interested. I handed over all the names and numbers I had, as well as details of the secret route through Thailand to get into Burma. Good girl. Afterwards - and not for the first time – it seemed to me that we at the Guardian should be using our resources ourselves. Instead of providing contact numbers for any independent TV company prepared to get on the phone to a journalist, we should make our own films.'

The radio stations are controlled by the group's subdivision, GMG Radio. As of Wednesday 18th October, GMG owns the Century stations in both Manchester and Gateshead after a surprise and an instant purchase from GCap Media.^[1]