At the weekend, a friend who is also a liberal grandee asked me sorrowfully about the sale of The Observer to the start-up media company Tortoise. What did I, as a former Sunday newspaper editor, think of this betrayal of the world’s oldest Sunday newspaper?
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.
The Scott Trust has protected The Guardian and The Observer from the crashing storms that the rest of the newspaper world has been going through, but funds are finite and readers declining.
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.
I later went on to edit the Evening Standard, which was perhaps the most romantic of newspapers, with front-page headlines that stopped traffic and united Tube passengers. Now Underground passengers look at their phones or, promisingly, books.
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.
It was at the BBC that I came to know James Harding, then head of news and now the co-founder and editor of Tortoise. He had been editor of The Times and set great store, as I did, by the written word, and the stories behind the necessary summary of broadcast news bulletins.
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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.
Those of us who have edited Sunday newspapers flinch at the thought of seven-day operations, which sound like leftovers. I remember being asked by one of the new guard what Sunday staff did between Monday and Saturday. I said, chin high but slightly wobbling, that we found stories, we worked on leads, we met contacts, we nurtured writing, we won awards, we edited.
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.
As for the ownership, the Scott Trust keeps a stake and the rest are long-term investors who are staking their money on the future health of the liberal media. They have pledged to invest £25m, mostly in the first two years, to establish The Observer as a print and digital business. The Atlantic is cited as a model that has flourished in the new media landscape. There is an editorial board, chaired by Richard Lambert, the former editor of the Financial Times, to ensure independence.
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 was rather more understanding. Journalists may be independent-minded and curious but they are bad at change. And they are mostly terrible on business. Harding has a background in business journalism so understands how to build a financial model. And he is charming enough to attract investment.
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.
Journalists are good at defiance. My own dear husband was once head of the union chapel during the Sunday Times move to Wapping. But now as then, it is time to put the past to bed, just as we used to put newspapers to bed in the days of hot metal. Embrace the future.
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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