Launched as its first incarnation, The Media Page, in May 1984, the Media Guardian morphed outside the main paper in the nineties to become the first regular media section in a national newspaper dedicated to the media business.
The pagination of the Monday morning supplement had thinned to just eight pages in recent times as its commercial staple of recruitment ads ebbed away in favour of rival online operations, and its own online media section.
It is not known if there will be any direct redundancies following the move although a group-wide redundancy programme is already in place.
The closure of the Media Guardian supplement comes a month after .
GNM announced the move after what it called "a successful summer trial", in which the pages of Media Guardian were folded into the main body of the paper, reducing printing costs and allowing for more flexibility in terms of coverage.
In addition to the media supplement, GNM is also folding its standalone Education and Society print supplements into the main paper.
Colin Hughes, director of Business & Professional at GNM, said: "In print, recruitment advertisers are increasingly looking for employer branding and capturing the attention of ‘passive’ job seekers, which is now more powerfully achieved in the main paper. We will also be using the sections on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday to connect closely with our developing online activity."
Speaking recently, the Guardian's head of media and technology, Dan Sabbagh, admitted he could not guarantee the survival of the Guardian’s media section in print, although he said he'd like to preserve it because he believes longer feature copy does not work as well online.
The Media Guardian is one year older than Haymarket’s Media Week, which made the move to online-only in December 2009. Since the migration, Media Week's reach has never been stronger, with traffic to its website increasing more than three fold with monthly highs of more 180,000 unique browsers.
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