The Observer’s new app promo. Picture: The Observer
The Observer could not be in a “better, more positive position” to head into its first full year of ownership by Tortoise Media, according to co-CEO Richard Furness.
Tortoise’s acquisition of Sunday newspaper The Observer from Guardian News and Media, which had owned it for 32 years, took effect in April.
The Observer launched its first dedicated website that month, although Furness described it as “a sort of holding website”. It relaunched in November with a registration wall, paywall, and app.
Previously, Observer journalism was housed on The Guardian’s website. The Guardian continues to own the Observer archive although Tortoise can make use of a limited number of articles.
Furness told Press Gazette that The Observer’s early subscriber and registration numbers were “really encouraging” and particularly cited the number of people choosing to sign up for a combined print and digital subscription.
A digital Observer subscription costs £16 per month or £144 for a year, while a print and digital package starts at £18 per month. A monthly donation to The Guardian, which gives readers unlimited app access, costs £12 each month or £120 for a year.
Asked how The Observer was ending 2025, Furness said: “I’d say we are completely on plan.”
He noted this was despite them having to work through a raft of “unknowns” including whether the takeover deal would complete, when it would do so, and what gaps would need filling after The Observer left The Guardian. For example, no sport, international or business journalists moved over and a dedicated commercial team needed to be built. At least a third of The Observer’s 70 editorial staff took redundancy or jobs at The Guardian instead of moving across to Tortoise Media.
“I would say we have momentum,” Furness said. “The Observer’s growing, which I’m not sure how many people can say that… So we have a 234-year-old newspaper, and it’s growing.
“It’s growing its audience. It’s growing its market share. There are more people now reading us digitally, more people subscribing. We’re happy with the print numbers.
“So I think we’re ending the year knowing that we are at the start of this, and it’s a multi-year project that we’re going into. But I don’t think we could be in a better, more positive position heading into what will be the first full year of print and digital and full ownership in 2026.
“We’re entering that with a real spirit of: the fun starts here. A lot of the foundations are in place now.”
Salt Path was first major ‘hit’ for post-Guardian Observer
The paywall launch marked the end of the initial two phases of the acquisition, Furness said.
Phase one was to produce and improve the print product plus build the necessary accompanying operational capabilities, while phase two was to create the digital version of The Observer.
The Observer’s high point for traffic so far was in July when it published the first instalments in its Salt Path investigation into allegations that major elements of a non-fiction book about an older couple’s 360-mile journey were fabricated or misleading.
The Observer’s monthly UK audience jumped from 1.6 million people in June to 2.6 million in July, while total minutes spent rocketed from 5.1 million to 13.3 million (according to Ipsos iris).
According to Furness, the launch of the paywall has not impacted traffic:“That absolutely hasn’t been the case, because we’re delivering those sort of hit pieces of journalism that people think it’s worth registering for and worth paying for. So, so far, I feel really encouraged.”
Audience data for December is not yet available and the paywall launched with just four days to go in November. Figures for November were higher than both September and October with a monthly audience of 1.7 million people in the UK.
The current threshold for making it into Press Gazette’s ranking of the 50 biggest news websites in the UK is a monthly audience of 2.5 million.
Furness said Salt Path was “the first real [Observer] story that had a video element, an audio element, a print element and a digital element. So to see that all together, and to see that being planned, and see that story take off in that way, was incredible.
“And it really did [take off]. When we talk about hit journalism and journalism that you can’t read anywhere else, I think that’s the shining light example of just a brilliant piece of investigative journalism that’s away from the 24/7 news cycle, and takes a journalist of such courage and intrepidness just to keep following the story and to keep hammering home… rather than being distracted by what’s happening in the White House or Number 10.
“That was just a perfect example, I think, of what journalism could be, and a perfect example of how the merging of these two newsrooms can work and complement each other. No doubt that story was so much bigger than if The Observer ran it a year ago on its own, or if Tortoise ran it as a podcast a year ago on its own… for me, it was a real moment of, we’re onto something really special here.”
Furness said The Observer’s website and app have built on the philosophy of its print edition, which is about “making sense of the world”.
“It’s not a website designed to break news to you,” he said. “There are many websites, The Guardian, The New York Times, the BBC, who are absolutely brilliant at bringing you up-to-the minute live blogs on the latest Trump press conference or PMQs or whatever it might be that day.”
Instead, he said, they hope people will pay to receive “four or five stories a day that are absolute knockout that you can only read in The Observer”.
Other examples he shared included political editor Rachel Sylvester’s series where she interviews public figures like Sir Keir Starmer and Sir Richard Branson while taking a walk , reporting from correspondent Oliver Marsden in Afghanistan , and freelance journalist Tanya Gold’s feature asking: “Who was Jeffrey Epstein?” He added that the longer pieces are given “the space and the design on the website to really flourish”.
Editorially The Observer is being led by editor-in-chief James Harding and deputies Basia Cummings and Giles Whittell after the departure of print editor Lucy Rock.
Furness said The Observer has a “huge advantage” as a newspaper because it is a Sunday-only title. “If you did a straw poll of any execs or editorial teams at any seven-day-a-week newspaper, if they were honest and they were forecasting the future, I think most of them would say ‘well, you know, print’s got a future, but probably only at the weekend.’”
Newsstand sales for The Observer ‘holding up’
Of print, Furness said: “I think we have improved it, both in terms of production values, I think in terms of how it stands out on the newsstand, in terms of the journalism inside.”
Since the Tortoise takeover, The Observer is being printed on a higher grade of paper and usually features more pages in the New Review, culture and sport sections. It has also increased in price from £4 to £4.50.
Furness said: “From that first edition, April the 27th, we’ve committed to making the best paper we could.
“We are all charging premium prices for our newspapers now in the market. I think it’s only right that there’s a premium product that’s delivered both for readers and for advertisers.”
Richard Furness, co-CEO of The Observer. Picture: The Observer
The Observer does not publicly report its print circulation figures, a decision first made by GNM in July 2021 when the paper was on 136,656 per week.
But Furness told Press Gazette that The Observer’s market share is “up every week”.
“We’re getting closer to competitors, and we’re gaining share off people.
“I’m pleased with newsstand sales performance. I think that’s holding up despite a price increase. So in terms of the year on year, decline is down to single digits, which for a Sunday newspaper in this market is quite rare.”
Among publicly-reported newspapers (which do not include the Times, Sun or Telegraph titles) the Mail on Sunday had the smallest Sunday year-on-year decline in November of 7%. The Sunday tabloids were all down by around 20%.
Observer revenue per edition has gone up
Furness also cited an “anonymous to known strategy to get more people on the newsstand to commit to a subscription” which he said is “going in the right direction”.
He added that The Observer is “working so hard” with national and independent retailers to build relationships and maintained the retail margin when the cover price went up. He also said the brand has done a deal to get in front of “important audiences” including in C-suite offices and ad agencies.
The newspaper, now with its own commercial team led by chief commercial officer Mike Duffy and director of advertising Nick Territt , is also using new ad formats, such as cover wraps, for the first time.
The Observer regularly features luxury advertisers that had never or rarely worked with it before, Furness said, citing Rolex, Porsche and Omega. He cited the effort put into improving the design and production of the newspaper.
This has come after an interim period in which The Guardian had continued selling adverts for The Observer. Furness said they were doing so “really well, but the sooner we were in charge of that, the better”.
As a result of these changes, Furness said the revenue per edition is now higher. The commercial sell is now “much more rounded” because of the full digital launch, he added.
High hopes for video growth
Online, ITV was the digital launch partner for a new advertising model when the relaunched website went live in November.
Video is “quite nascent” for The Observer, Furness said, but they are working on building on Tortoise’s success in audio which saw their podcasts reaching a younger and more female audience than the average.
Former Sky News political producer Tom Larkin was hired as head of Observer TV to build a video team and think about “how we tell stories differently, which is important, how we reach new audiences, and how we lift up things like audio that we’ve already got and make them better and more appealing to people”.
Furness added: “We have high hopes for video and I think, like for any news publisher, we know it’s a critical part of the future and a critical part of engaging with new audiences.”
The period before Christmas was seen as a major test of what would drive registrations and paid subscriptions to the new Observer, both in terms of the journalism itself and marketing messaging.
The Observer placed marketing on The Guardian in print and online (as part of a continuing deal providing some services and inventory), across its own newsletters, audio and print, and organically and paid on social media.
The three main messages are “using the gift that George Orwell gave us by describing The Observer as ‘the enemy of nonsense’”, and reinforcing the fact that The Observer is now putting out journalism every day and that it is not just a print newspaper.
“If you think about the audiences to hit, The Guardian audience is quite an important one, where many of that audience will think of The Observer as the seventh day of The Guardian in a print newspaper. So a lot of what we’re doing is forcing people to look again,” Furness explained.
The title has also been inviting readers in “for a cup of tea” via adverts in the paper to get their feedback.
“I don’t think there’s been a single person who didn’t know about the changes to The Observer and the change of ownership, and they’ve been quite open and welcome the conversation about what that might mean and their sort of fears at the start and how that’s been reassured now.
“It’s been really fascinating to have a good reminder of how much your audience care and how much you need to sort of have that constant dialogue with them about what you’re doing.”
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