Visitors with a UK IP address will be automatically directed to the new site, although they can opt to navigate to the U.S. or Canadian versions instead. The U.S. site brings in 1.2 million visitors from the UK each month according to comScore.
The new site couldn't come at a better time, with the world's attention fixed on the British media industry after tabloid News of the World was caught in yet another phone-hacking scandal, this time for listening to and deleting the voicemail of a missing 13-year-old girl, later found dead.
The AOL-owned news site is armed with a team of 300 unpaid bloggers, UK editor Carla Buzasi told PaidContent -- a modest number compared to the 10,000 writing for its U.S. counterpart.
In a testy editorial posted to the Guardian's blog, media reporter Jemima Kiss acknowledged that the publication "is arguably the most direct competition yet for the Guardian, as a tech-forward, left of centre news site with a significant overlap in audience," but that it is heavily weighed down by its "cluttered design" and that, since it was acquired by AOL, it is "no longer the radical, fast-moving, independent spirit of online news innovation" it once was.
It will be interesting to see if The Guardian's "digital first" strategy can ward off that threat or if, as Kiss fears, both readers and advertisers will become enamored by the aggregation, celebrity blogging and "social media bells and whistles."