I’ve been writing about the media industry for so long, I’m too jaded to bother being depressed about the illusions it creates about itself any more.
So when my colleague Hugh Linehan checked with me in October to see if the column he was planning on the Guardian Media Group’s sale of the Observer overlapped with anything I might want to do for this slot a few days later, it was an easy no. My presumption then was that the petitions were understandable but pointless, that this was a straightforward business play in the print media endgame and that the Guardian’s sale-happy management would, sooner or later, get its way.
It probably still will. But this transaction no longer seems quite so clear-cut. And there is, of course, always an upside to protesting a process if it seems wrong. That’s especially true when the organisation at the centre of it has cultivated an image of fairness, integrity and general high-mindedness. At least everyone knows what the deal is when you work for Rupert Murdoch.
The record will show, however this pans out, that it was not just idealistic celebrities and left-wing politicians who objected to the proposed offloading of the 233-year-old liberal-minded Sunday newspaper to loss-making start-up Tortoise Media.
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Nor was it only one former Observer editor who thought the move “a gamble, a throw of the dice” and wondered why no competing offers were being sought. It was five of them, plus former editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger. The company’s assertion that the paper is loss-making if shared costs are taken into account is not evidence of the kind of crisis that would justify a “rushed” sale, the ex-editors wrote, in a letter that is subtly damning.
Most tellingly, members of the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) employed by the group have been crying foul, voting in overwhelming numbers to strike.
The NUJ tends to be a realist organisation. If it believed the Guardian Media Group truly had no choice on financial grounds but to jettison the Observer or shut it down in order to protect the Guardian itself, the union would move fast enough to expressing sorrow and regret while negotiating the best terms possible for the Observer’s 70 staff.
But few people beyond the ranks of Guardian management, led by chief executive Anna Bateson and editor-in-chief Katharine Viner, think this hasty end to the Guardian’s 31-year ownership of the Observer is either necessary or beneficial to the Guardian itself; nor do they believe the casting off of the newspaper is being handled properly.
The Scott Trust, the ultimate owner of the Guardian Media Group, will vote on the sale this week. Employees will soon find out if it feels it still has a “duty of stewardship” towards the Guardian’s sister title, as the ex-editors phrased it, and how it defines that duty if it does.
[ Guardian parent company in talks over potential sale of Observer newspaperOpens in new window ]
For the NUJ, there is little doubt: cutting the Observer loose would be a “betrayal” of commitments made to the newspaper. As such, journalists across both the Guardian and the Observer will down tools on Wednesday and Thursday in the first of two 48-hour stoppages scheduled this month. The havoc this walkout will play with Christmas deadlines is surely proof alone of the level of anger and frustration boiling over here.
Amid the pile-up of objections, Tortoise has been catching strays – a lack of faith in its capacity to guide the Observer to a sustainable future is implied at every turn.
The company was founded five years ago by James Harding, a former editor of the Times and the former boss of BBC News. He’s a serious guy with strong industry pedigree. The Tortoise vision of operating a “slow newsroom” that runs parallel to the now-now-now vibe of the 24-hour news cycle is an admirable one. Its promises include an investment of £25 million (€30 million) in the Observer over a five-year period and the non-assuring assurance that it will continue to publish the title every Sunday in some form.
It is reasonable to think that whatever Tortoise wants to do to the Observer, it could hardly be worse than the “don’t buy this” message the Guardian has effectively slapped on it over the past decade-plus of shrinking pagination and ever-stretching resources. It could scarcely become any more invisible online than the current strategy of digitally publishing Observer content under the Guardian brand, which was ominous by design from the start.
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And yet the fact remains that the acquisition of any newspaper in 2024 would risk putting even a profitable, established, diversified company into the red. Handing one over to a podcast publisher that is already losing money is asking for trouble. It feels like the beginning of the end for the Observer because it probably is.
We will never know the counter-factual, but it is likely that the Observer would already be defunct in print form if Sir Anthony O’Reilly had succeeded in adding it to the Independent Newspapers stable in the early 1990s. The Guardian and the Scott Trust “saved” the Observer at that time.
But as with the 2022 stoppages at the New York Times and the Mirror’s publisher Reach, this strike is impossible to separate from a sense of swelling hostility towards the group’s incumbent top executives. It doesn’t help that the increasingly fractious saga has come right on top of a company advertising campaign that trumpeted how the Guardian, thanks to its trust structure, was free to operate without being beholden to commercial pressures. Its slogan? “Not for sale.”
Deal or no deal, this is poised to be a crucial week for the group and its journalists. The main lesson so far is that Guardian staff have been loyal to their Observer colleagues, while the company has not.
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