What follows is mere gossip and not from any one source. Just a general accumulation over the years.
The Guardian – to the extent that the permanent staff really are the institution – has been terribly pissed at The Observer for many a year now. There’s long been a hoope, maybe even a demand, that it simply become the Sunday Guardian.
Yet the two papers have really rather different institutional memories. The G has long been progressively, wokely, left. The O rather more retained that classical liberal leftiness they once both had.
This difference has come out over things like trans etc. The O hasn’t embraced to anything like the extent The G has. And as The G owns The O this pisses more than some off.
This has all been going on for years. And we can take this sell the bugger idea to be an admission that the actual takeover – intellectually, in day to day power etc – isn’t going to work. Therefore stop trying.
Wonder if the Observer actually makes any money?
Timmy: you missed out on “Observations about the Observer”
@rupert
Doubt it. GMG as a whole makes a whopping great loss; if it was profitable it would have been sold/spun off years ago. A la Autotrader.
The trust which owns the Guardian and Observer generates returns which more than cover the papers’ losses. It could carry on forever at the present rate, so there’s no economic rationale for selling. Also, the only point of the trust is to support the Guardian and the Observer, so how is it even allowed to sell?
Tortoise Media racked up around £16m in losses between launching in 2019 and the end of 2022, but said it still had around £4m of cash in the bank thanks to investment from private equity, crowdfunding and individual backers. So, they were on track to be skint by now, but are instead in a position to buy an established Sunday newspaper.
Tortoise seems to be funded entirely by ‘partners’ who commit cash despite a small and falling readership. A recent partner is Soros’s Open Society foundation…. of course it is. Can’t see the ‘classical liberal’ elements of the Observer lasting long under its new ownership.
I’m old enough to remember when, although leftie, the Observer was a decent read. Of course I’ve not seen it in decades.
But then I’m so old I can remember when The Times, The Telegraph, and The Scotsman were good papers.
“The trust which owns the Guardian and Observer” No longer.
The Scott Trust metamorphosed into The Scott Trust Ltd as a tax-dodging move. Which is fair enough as the Scott Trust was originally set up as a tax-dodging move.
If they didn’t have double standards socialists wouldn’t have any standards at all.
The trust is to preserve The G, not The O. Also, it’s changed as the other comment. But still has that job, preserve The G only.
Isn’t the G of the view that proprietors shouldn’t interfere with editorial decisions? Or does that depend on the propeietors views?