Guardian editor-in-chief Katharine Viner said a deal with Tortoise “has the potential to be a very positive thing…reports Asian Lite News
News publisher Guardian Media Group said Tuesday it is in talks to sell The Observer newspaper to Tortoise Media, a “slow news” outlet founded by a former BBC executive and a US diplomat.
Founded in 1791, the Observer is the world’s oldest Sunday newspaper. It was bought by Guardian Media Group, which also publishes the Guardian, in 1993. Tortoise was co-founded in 2019 by James Harding, a former BBC news executive and editor of The Times newspaper, and Matthew Barzun, who was a U.S. ambassador to Britain between 2013 and 2017.
Tortoise has produced multimedia investigations including the popular podcast “Sweet Bobby,” which is set to be made into a Netflix documentary. The companies did not disclose the price or terms of the potential deal.
Guardian editor-in-chief Katharine Viner said a deal with Tortoise “has the potential to be a very positive thing.” “My number one priority is a future in which both titles continue to thrive and deliver high quality journalism to our readers,” she said.
Harding said the Observer “is one of the greatest names in news.”
“We believe passionately in its future – both in print and digital,” he said, promising to maintain the newspaper’s “uncompromising commitment to editorial independence, evidence-based reporting and journalistic integrity.”
The Observer, like the rest of the newspaper industry, has suffered a decline in print sales. Its circulation was 136,656 copies in 2021, before GMG stopped publishing ABC sales data.
Its online content is closely integrated with the Guardian’s.
Tortoise said it would continue to publish The Observer on a Sunday and build the digital Observer, combining it with Tortoise’s podcasts, newsletters and live events.
“Like its many, many loyal readers, we admire the strength and heart of The Observer’s reporting, we prize its original, unbiddable thinking and we love it for its passions: food, music, film and art,” Harding said.
“George Orwell described The Observer as ‘the enemy of nonsense’; we’re excited to show readers, old and new, that it still is,” he added.
GMG’s 2023-24 results, published on Tuesday, showed pressure from a slowdown in advertising and the long-term print decline.
Overall revenue fell 2.5% to 257.8 million pounds ($340.6 million), it said, and adjusted cash outflow rose to 36.5 million pounds, from 17.3 million pounds in the previous year.
The company is owned by the Scott Trust, an endowment fund valued at 1.275 billion pounds, the results showed.
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