LONDON: Britain’s Guardian newspaper adopted a new tabloid format and a re-designed masthead with simple black lettering from Monday as part of a drive to cut costs.

The left-leaning newspaper previously had a blue and white masthead and in 2005 had adopted a Berliner format, midway between a broadsheet and a tabloid.

“Our move to tabloid format is a big step towards making The Guardian financial sustainable,” the paper’s editor-in-chief Katharine Viner said in a piece for the first new edition.

She called it “bold, striking and beautiful.”

Speaking at the relaunch, she vowed that “Guardian journalism itself will remain what it has always been: thoughtful, progressive, fiercely independent and challenging; and also witty, stylish and fun.”

The Guardian is selling or scrapping its three presses worth £80 million (90 million euros, $110 million) to cut costs and printing will be outsourced to tabloid-format presses run by Trinity Mirror media group.

The website, which attracts 150 million monthly unique browsers worldwide, has also undergone a redesign.

The company is aiming to break even by April 2019, mainly through cutting costs and boosting digital ad revenue to make up for a sharp decline in print ad revenue.

The first tabloid edition’s main front-page photograph was of Chelsea Manning, the whistle blower whose leaked diplomatic cables were published by the Guardian, and who is now running for the US Senate.

Tabloid rival The Sun poked fun at its highbrow competitor, boasting on its front page that it was “20p less than The Mirror, £1.50 less than the tabloid Guardian.”