The Guardian Year 1996 - Tapa blanda

The best news stories, features, diary stories, gossip, trends, photgraphs, cartoons from the Guardian in 1996.

Voted newspaper of the year in 1996 the Guardian has reinforced its reputation while those of its rivals have crumbled around it. No price cutting, no spurious offers to readers, it has not gone blue for Pepsi but has concentrated on what it does best: assembling a wide and diverse spread of columnists from Suzanne Moore to Vincent Hanna, Armando Iannucci to Catherine Bennett, Francis Wheen to Hugo Young. And its coverage of the news has been unrivalled: John Vidal has spent longer than any other journalist with the protestors at Newbury; Simon Hoggart has been acerbic and pointed sketching the year at Wesminster; Edward Pilkington has followed all the royal shenanigans and David Hearst has watched at close quarters as Israel and Hizbollah tried to annihilate each other. It’s robust, vigorous, independent, compelling: jouranlism at its best.

Georgina Henry is the deputy-editor of the Guardian.