When a protest is supported by names ranging from Delia Smith and Mary Beard to Jarvis Cocker and Hugh Grant, it’s worth paying attention. So the recent open letter to Guardian Media Group and its owner, the Scott Trust, expressing dismay at the possible sale of the Observer reflects the special place the 232-year-old Sunday newspaper still holds in British affections.
In some Irish ones too. I first fell in love with Sunday newspapers through the irresistible gateway drug of Clive James’s TV reviews in the Observer, when the title epitomised a newer, better, fresher, deeper sort of broadsheet journalism. Those days are long gone, and many will see its current predicament as sad but inevitable.
Unsurprisingly, the sale has aroused fierce opposition from within the combined journalistic staff of the two papers. Or, to put it more accurately, the journalists of the digital-first media group whose print platforms are the Monday-to-Saturday Guardian and the Sunday-only Observer. That’s probably the way Guardian management would have phrased it for the past two decades.
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A little historical context. The Guardian, the UK’s only left-leaning quality daily newspaper, has been controlled for almost 90 years by the not-for-profit Scott Trust. Back in 1993, when people thought a seven-days-a-week printing operation was the future, it seemed sensible for the trust to acquire the venerable but ailing Observer. The two papers shared similar liberal values, and there was significant crossover between their readerships. Everyone else at the time, including the highly successful and still relatively young Independent, was expanding too.
Years passed. Everything changed. Instead of talking about seven-day printing, newspapers started thinking seriously about getting out of print altogether. The London Independent printed its final physical edition in 2016. Most publicly vocal on the pivot to digital was Guardian Media Group under the editorial leadership of Alan Rusbridger, who promoted a vision of the Guardian as a postprint, politically progressive global media brand without any subscription charge.
In that grand vision the Observer seemed like an evolutionary anachronism, the media equivalent of an appendix. It looked neglected by its parent; editions got slimmer as sections and supplements were axed or amalgamated. Circulation, in common with all its peers’, plummeted.
When GMG and the Scott Trust announced they had entered negotiations with the news website Tortoise over a sale, the news was greeted with alarm internally. Founded five years ago by the former London Times editor James Harding, Tortoise (the clue is in the name) is an exponent of “slow journalism”, eschewing clickbait in favour of in-depth investigation and inquiry. It’s an appealing concept that has been doing the rounds at media circles for some time, and underpins other new ventures such as Semafor. But its commercial viability remains unproven.
For Observer journalists, who had been working alongside their Guardian colleagues for years, the possibility of being expelled from the company’s King’s Cross offices is bleak. Many see it as a betrayal of a verbal promise made at the time of the original acquisition by the chairman of the Scott Trust at the time, Hugo Young, that the Observer would enjoy exactly the same protections as the Guardian.
Carol Cadwalladr, a long-standing Observer investigative journalist, laid out the argument in a thread on X last week. Since 1993, she argues, the Observer has been covered by the trust’s mandate to protect the financial and editorial independence of the Guardian in perpetuity. “But perpetuity ain’t what it used to be.”
It seems safe to assume that the Scott Trust’s lawyers have assured themselves that Young’s 1993 statement is not legally binding. But the trust and Guardian Media Group will surely shift uncomfortably in their seats when Cadwalladr points out how the Guardian promotes its content (including the work of Observer journalists) to its own readers. “Thanks to reader funding, we’re not for sale,” runs one ad.
“It’s not just that @ObserverUK shares a bloodstream & vital organs with @guardian: same editor-in-chief, office, foreign, sport, business, legal, commercial, IT and marketing & managing ed teams,” she writes. “Or that all @ObserverUK contracts are with the @guardian … Because @ObserverUK doesn’t really exist. It has no corporate identity.”
Reverse takeovers of print relics by digital newbies seem to be in fashion. On the opposite side of the UK’s ideological tracks, the Spectator magazine was acquired last month by Paul Marshall, founder of GB News, who promptly placed it under the management of Freddie Sayers, editor of another Marshall property, the news website Unherd (which also describes itself as slow journalism). Unlike the Observer, though, the Spectator is in rude financial health, which rather alters the dynamic.
Back at King’s Cross, with the support of some of the UK’s most famous celebrities, the Observer’s staff are bracing themselves for battle. I wouldn’t bet against them.