LONDON: Britain’s Guardian newspaper adopted a new tabloid format and a re-designed masthead with simple black lettering from Monday as part of a drive to cut costs.

The left-leaning newspaper previously had a blue and white masthead and in 2005 had adopted a Berliner format, midway between a broadsheet and a tabloid.

“Our move to tabloid format is a big step towards making The Guardian financial sustainable,” the paper’s editor-in-chief Katharine Viner said in a piece for the first new edition. She called it “bold, striking and beautiful”.

Speaking at the relaunch, she vowed that “Guardian journalism itself will remain what it has always been: thoughtful, progressive, fiercely independent and challenging; and also witty, stylish and fun.”

The Guardian is selling or scrapping its three presses worth 80 million ($110 million) to cut costs and printing will be outsourced to tabloid-format presses run by Trinity Mirror media group.

The website, which attracts 150m monthly unique browsers worldwide, has also undergone a redesign.

Published in Dawn, January 16th, 2018