Richard Furness on building a new Observer that’s ‘proudly a second read’
The Media Leader Interview
The Observer‘s co-CEO discusses why the relaunched title aims to be a newspaper with ‘the sensibility of a magazine’.
“This is about the merging of two newsrooms.”
For Richard Furness, co-CEO of the recently relaunched Observer, the new version of the title is not simply about recreating the news brand, but evolving it for the digital era.
“This isn’t just producing The Observer from a different building,” he explains. “This is about taking the brilliance of The Observer and the journalists who work on The Observer, and merging them with the excellence that’s already at Tortoise.
“Tortoise already has this wealth of brilliant audio journalism, data journalism, digital journalism. What we’re doing is putting the teams together and mixing that up. I think the results will be really fantastic.”
Furness is speaking to The Media Leader amid Friday’s bustling relaunch. Just minutes before connecting on the phone, The Observer sent out its very first newsletter under new ownership. Hours earlier, its website, Observer.co.uk, went live. The top story: an exposé on Tristan Tate.
“The world’s oldest Sunday newspaper got its first-ever website,” Furness remarks with an air of pride.
He also exudes delight over the fact that the Observer brand has received prominence over its acquirer. The title will supersede Tortoise as the hero brand of the publisher going forward, with Tortoise absorbed as a sub-brand dedicated to audio.
“The Observer is an incredible brand,” says Furness. “The beauty of what Tortoise has done in an audio landscape has been attracting a really interesting, young, female audience to its podcast. They will know the Tortoise brand more than the Observer brand. So it’s important to us that we keep Tortoise as an audio brand.”
Not ‘easiest of transitions’
Furness spent 27 years at The Guardian, most recently as chief strategy officer. After helping lead Tortoise’s takeover of The Observer, he joined the publisher in March.
He is the first to acknowledge the ownership change has been fraught. Guardian and Observer journalists agreed to strike action in December 2024 following the announcement of the sale of the title by Guardian Media Group. Concerns levied by former staff included job security, lack of transparency over Tortoise’s financial backers and lack of support for Tortoise’s plan for a paywall.
In the end, only around half of Observer journalists agreed to move over.
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“It wasn’t the easiest of transitions,” Furness admits. “Lots of opposition, public voices around the move. I would say it was the right decision not to force people to come across here if they didn’t want to come and lots of people have lots of different reasons to not come — and that was fine by us.
“We wish them all the best. We thank them for everything they did for The Observer. It wouldn’t be as strong without their efforts.
“But what I can tell you is the people who are here, the people who chose to come across, there is a palpable air of excitement that I haven’t felt for years in a newsroom. It feels like we’re creating something incredibly special, both in print and digitally.”
Furness confirmed that The Observer would have a paywall instituted by the autumn, telling The Media Leader that it will be a “dynamic” and “smart” paywall.
In the meantime, senior leadership are set on building out the editorial team. The initial focus has been on filling gaps, since The Observer did not have a number of news desks under The Guardian. These include sections such as sport, business and international news coverage, all of which was previously provided by Guardian staff.
Early hires include sports journalists Rory Smith and Paul Hayward, home affairs editor John Simpson, political editor Rachel Sylvester and literary editor Tom Gatti.
Premium destination
The same hiring efforts apply to the commercial team. Under Guardian Media Group’s ownership, there were no Observer-dedicated commercial or marketing teams.
Earlier this month, The Observer hired Guy Edmunds as director of advertising. Edmunds, who previously spent 20 years in commercial roles at The Guardian, told The Media Leader that “the opportunity to reimagine The Observer was too good an opportunity to pass by”.
However, as The Media Leader reports today, Edmunds departed the title after just a handful of days in the job, opting to return to former employer Carwow following a counter-offer.
The move is likely to set back the fledgling Observer’s commercial efforts while the company seeks a replacement.
Tortoise itself has never been profitable. In its most recent financial filing, the publisher reported a loss of £3.8m for 2023, an improvement over the £4.6m it lost in 2022. The Observer, meanwhile, contributed £3.4m to Guardian Media Group in the year to August 2024, excluding shared costs. However, Guardian Media Group CEO Anna Bateson had warned staff that the title would be loss-making within three years, prompting the sale.
For Furness’ part, he tells The Media Leader that he is keen to build a “world-class commercial team”, calling it a “unique opportunity to build that team out from scratch”.
While Furness declines to estimate the size of the eventual team once it is fully staffed, he acknowledges that the sales strategy will focus primarily on integrated brand partnerships and direct sales as opposed to programmatic — a similar approach to that of Tortoise.
“We want to create a really premium destination for brands,” he says. “And I think you do that by pushing direct sales, not going down the programmatic route.”
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‘The sensibility of a magazine’
Another way to push premium? Invest in a high-quality print product.
The new-look Observer uses a high-quality paper equivalent to 52 grammes per square metre (GSM) — a weightier material than most competitors, many of which have sought to reduce their GSM over the years to save on costs.
“We’re putting a huge amount of focus on the production value of the newspaper service, the look and feel of the newspaper itself, and the magazines,” says Furness. He suggests that the conversations over print that have occurred in the new Observer headquarters are not likely to be “happening in any other newsroom in Britain”.
“Every newspaper has just had this cutting back of quality over the last couple of decades,” he continues. “What we’re doing is bucking that trend.
“Readers, when they pick up the newspaper on Sunday, will feel a sense of familiarity — the sections are still the same, the brilliant writers are still writing for us — but the paper will also feel different.”
But perhaps not every writer. Among the top Observer talent that didn’t make the transition was star features writer Carole Cadwalladr. In an article titled “Fuckity Bye” in her Substack How to Survive the Broligarchy, Cadwalladr eulogised The Observer as she knew it.
“A large chunk of The Guardian’s journalism will no longer be ‘free and open’,” she wrote. “It’ll either be non-existent — most of the journalists have no jobs to go to — and those who do will now be published on a privately owned website behind a paywall.”
In a later post on Bluesky following the release of the new Observer’s first Sunday edition, Cadwalladr lamented that she had seemingly been replaced by Nick Clegg, the former Liberal Democrat deputy prime minister and subsequent president of global affairs at Meta.
The irony could not be lost that Cadwalladr, author of a renowned series of articles on how Meta (then Facebook) was implicated in the Cambridge Analytica scandal, was no longer at The Observer — yet an ex-Meta executive was writing essays for it.
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But, for Furness, the sale makes both business and editorial sense.
“The beauty of this deal is what The Observer has never had, Tortoise has got in abundance,” he says. “The Observer is a brilliant, historic, weekly print newspaper. Tortoise is a fabulous digital publisher, really strong in audio, really strong in newsletters and digital. The idea of bringing this together was just a joy.”
The new editorial direction of the paper under Tortoise will follow in the publisher’s “slow news” ethos. As Furness describes, the title aims to have “the sensibility of a magazine”.
He explains: “It’s still a newspaper, but a newspaper that will have a much more reflective tone to it. It isn’t trying to rapidly break news to you every minute of the day. The Observer is not that. And The Observer won’t be that.
“If you look at the website that’s just launched, it’s not going to be doing up-to-the-second live blogs on every instant that’s happening around the world. We’re not going to be competing there. The BBC do that brilliantly, The Guardian do that brilliantly, The New York Times do that brilliantly.
“What I think we will be is quite proudly a second read. Helping explain what’s happening, helping people make sense of that world.”