Just over ten years ago, February 10th 2015, OffGuardian published its first ever article. This month, we are celebrating the OffGuardian anniversary.
This one.
It is a single paragraph 55 words long, has no featured image and I’m afraid the name of the author is lost to time (it was probably Systematic, a founding editor who retired a couple of years in).
It’s essentially just a comment, and you can see in it the original mission of the site – a place to put comments The Guardian wouldn’t publish from people they kept banning.
Two months later I arrived to “help out with some formatting for a little while”. Hah.
Then I wrote an article.
Then I wrote 900 more. And edited thousands of others.
In total we’ve now published 6572 articles, which have been viewed over 50 million times by 20 million people who have left almost 700,000 comments.
Not bad for a small informal collective of people who had to self-teach coding and video-editing and SEO and all that other stuff on the fly.
It really was like that. Real independence, not the kind of independence that comes with NGO grants or charitable status or friendly CIA-linked philanthropists. We did it all by ourselves.
There was a bigger plan for today. We were going to do a little season of retrospectives over our anniversary weekend, but you know what they say about plans and God’s sense of humour.
Unfortunately Catte – the last remaining founding editor – suddenly fell quite ill and our plans have collapsed (regular readers will no-doubt have noted our slowed output).
So, the party is on hold for now. But we still wanted to mark our birthday and say thank you to all those who have read and supported the site in the last ten years. We get messages thanking us for “keeping people sane” and “fighting the good fight” and we appreciate every single one of them.
It hasn’t always been easy, but it has always been worth it.
Read the full article here