Kath Viner on decision to sell The Observer! Whats the backstory, financial or GC or both?

[RaspberryParade]

'Guardian parent company in talks over potential sale of Observer
Guardian Media Group announces it is in negotiations with Tortoise Media over world’s oldest Sunday newspaper'
"The Guardian editor-in-chief, Katharine Viner, said: “This has the potential to be a very positive thing for both the Observer and the Guardian. My number one priority is a future in which both titles continue to thrive and deliver high-quality journalism to our readers. It is extremely important to me that the Observer, with its excellent journalistic reputation, loyal readership and heritage as the world’s oldest Sunday newspaper, is in good hands.”'

www.theguardian.com/media/2024/sep/17/guardian-parent-company-in-talks-over-potential-sale-of-observer

The Guardian is losing money. Having two sets of staff is expensive. Best guess is that they want to make the Guardian a seven day operation without having to pay redundancy to Observer staff.

I was thinking about Tortoise the other day and how it doesnt get much traffic.
I am extremely concerned for the Observers future, its only the best paper in Britain imv and has consistently been on the side of sanity on this issue.
From Guido Fawkes
Observer Set To Be Sold To Slow News, Low-Readership, No Profit Publisher

"Sky News reports that Guardian Media Group is in talks to sell The Observer to ‘slow news’ outlet Tortoise Media. GMG chief executive Anna Bateson says this is “an exciting strategic opportunity.” An opportunity to offload…
Liberal media supremo James Harding has championed his “centrist dad media” brand with the help of BBC, the left-wing broadsheets, and millions in initial funding over the course of its 2019 launch. Five years later Tortoise Media has a £4.6 million annual operating loss to show for it, which is up £1.5 million from the year before. On the bright side, not as bad as GMG’s £21 million loss…
According to analytics data from SimilarWeb, Tortoise is struggling to get consumers to read its drawling long-form content, either. Over the last 90 days this is how they have done in terms of reader visits, which Guido has handily compared with another not-for-profit online outlet also founded to do more highbrow journalism:

From July to August alone Tortoise’s traffic dropped by a whopping 41%, and it is now attracting fewer than 500,000 monthly unique visitors. Audiences are hardly crying out for boring, long-winded centrist content…
The Observer is beaten to the bottom of print circulation only by The Guardian. Birds of a feather flock together…

Papers always lose money. Amazed they’ve found a buyer.

Possibly, eitherway of the two of them the Observer is far more genuinely valuable in terms of journalistic integrity.

If it results in the Observer having its own seven-days-a-week website, in addition to its Sunday journalism, then I am cautiously pleased by this possible development (subject to proper assurances about journalistic integrity and independence from proprietors).

I've long been looking for an alternative to the guardian online, not just because of its failure to cover gender issues factually, but also because of the increasingly global (ie American) feel of the online paper. They seem to put up US stories on the allegedly UK version of the paper without even a light editorial once-over to remove US parochialisms (I don't just mean in relation to style, I mean substantive content features too). Increasingly they do this with Australian stories too.

And I see from this recent story that they want to further extend their globalism. I don't really want to read what will essentially become a US paper with a branch in the UK

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5167690-tortoise-media-in-talks-to-buy-observer

I love Tortoise. They do some very interesting investigative journalism. I hope this works out for them.

Yes but they have a tiny audience, so my concern is that as so many people dont realise the Observer is separate from the G so wont follow the Observers change of address and it will effectively dissapear

Tortoise have a tiny audience and many people dont realise the Observer is separate from the G so wont follow the Observers change of address which could make it slide into oblivion.
I am deeply attached to the Observer, its a beacon in a very dark media landscape.
I cant help feel there are other reasons as well, ego, ideological etc

I think the owners of the Tortoise are actually much more left leaning than the Observer whatever they claim (they all came from the Guardian originally) so I would also worry for its future. They want to buy it as a vanity project because print media has a credibility and an immediacy that podcasts can’t achieve. When Tortoise broke the news about Neil Gaiman I don’t think anyone picked up on it for about 24 hours which is mad whereas if it had been on the Guardian or the Times (even behind a paywall) it would have been picked up in hours.

Viner will be delighted to no longer have Observer articles - with their inconvenient insistence on reality - appearing under the Guardian brand.

I would love the observer to be 7 days a week and would definitely ditch the guardian!

I think Tortoise is doing some very high-quality journalism, but I don’t know how they can afford £25m for the Observer. I wonder if they’ll keep the print edition? I assume their thinking is that owning the Observer will raise their profile and bring people to the Tortoise website.

I'd assume they want the Observer brand to increase their reach and the impact of their journalism so I'd expect the brand to stay for now.

So the link for this thread doesn't really say anything different than the existing thread reporting on Tortoise.

And if anything obscures what is going on. And from an unreliable source.

Why is Viner ("everything I do is informed by my queer politics") presuming to talk about the Observer.

The Observer is editorial distinct from the Guardian.

Would be more interesting to find out what the Observer editor thinks.

@IwantToRetire Has it occured I might not have seen the other thread? But thanks for your input anyway.
"Would be more interesting to find out what the Observer editor thinks.'
Perhaps you should investigate and do a thread about it.