Caroline Marland obituary

Managing director of Guardian Media Group who was the first woman to hold such a senior post on a national newspaper

Caroline Marland, the former managing director of Guardian Media Group and the first woman to hold such a senior post on a national newspaper, who has died aged 80, was to a considerable extent the person who saved the Guardian financially in the 1980s.

It was largely Marland’s initiative to wrest much of the job advertising market from the Times and Telegraph during that decade. This led to the creation of the paper’s successful weekly supplements: media on Mondays, education on Tuesdays, society on Wednesdays, all supported by tens and eventually hundreds of pages of job adverts, which produced revenues for the hitherto precariously financed paper that ran into many tens of millions annually.