OFF SWITCH

The Guardian Offers Royals-Free Home Page

“Republican” readers can turn off royal-wedding coverage.

For the minority of Britons who oppose the monarchy, The Guardian, the country’s left-leaning newspaper, has offered a digital compromise: Visitors to its website can click a button to instantly hide all royal-wedding coverage from the homepage. The site’s “royalist” view shows a giant banner packed with the sort of wedding stories dominating most British media websites Friday, but the “republican” view collapses the banner. The Guardian is the only site offering a respite from royal-wedding fever, probably because some of its left-wing readers oppose the monarchy. The tension was on display elsewhere on the paper’s site: An op-ed column addressed the question of whether socialists could enjoy the royal wedding without compromising their convictions, and a special blog covering world events was headlined, “Not the royal wedding blog—as it didn’t happen.”