I replied that I was moved by the protests, of seeing the celebrated Robert Harris and Anne Robinson on the picket line with junior staff, but that I was optimistic about the sale. We can’t let the romance of the past blind us to the peril of the present, or to any lifeboats which promise a future.
As editor of the Sunday Telegraph, I tried to find new audiences in the eight months I was permitted before being sacked for insurrection. Before that, I was in charge of the Saturday Telegraph, which was called the new Sunday, piling on supplements and readers. But bulk started to look wasteful.
By the time I went to edit BBC Radio 4’s Today programme in 2017, I was surprised to see the print editions of every daily newspaper strewn across desks. I was reading everything on an iPad.
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Read MoreJames used to hold an additional conference for reporters to talk about what was going on in a more analytical and discursive way, which made us all slightly roll our eyes since it seemed to cut into the business of the day. But this was, of course, the concept behind podcasts and of Tortoise Media – and of the Sunday newspaper.
Ah, that role. As the Tortoise Media purchase of The Observer was confirmed so was the first appointment: not a chief content officer but a print editor, and it has gone to a proper working journalist, the much admired Observer staffer Lucy Rock.
A former senior figure at The Guardian told me that he was baffled by the truculence of journalists given what a hopeful option they had before them: The Observer saved and given a new lease of life – liberal journalism in play just when the right seems to have the best tunes.
I have seen how his charm works. He once knelt in front of me to ask if I would do an item on the Today programme about an anniversary of the Balfour Declaration. I dedicated a whole episode to it and it was bracing to weave history with real-time controversy. Quite a Tortoise way of doing things.
Sarah Sands is a British journalist and author. She edited the London Evening Standard and Today on BBC Radio 4 from 2017 to 2020
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