When digital goes shopping for print

Well, here’s an interesting trend: digital players acquiring traditional print media.

• The sale of The Spectator is beginning to look like Unherd acquiring it, especially with Freddie Sayers, Unherd editor-in-chief andCEO of Old Queen Street Media, which now owns both titles, becoming publisher of the magazine.
• Slow journalism startup turned podcast powerhouse Tortoise is trying to acquire The Observer from the Scott Trust.

There are some clear differences between the two deals: one has happened, while one is still being negotiated, for instance. The Spectator makes money, and adding it to Unherd makes a nicely chonky right-of-centre media group. You can see (and I hate myself for using this word) synergies in the acquisition. Whereas The Observer is the second string title for Guardian Media Group, which is struggling to reverse its deficit.

Trouble at t’Observer

Indeed, the Tortoise/Observer deal makes less sense on the surface. They’re very different products, and while taking some of the newspaper’s star writers and incorporating them into the Tortoise podcast empire might add some value, surely it’s not enough to make the merger work?

One is tempted to see it almost as a nostalgia play from James Harding, co-founder (and co-funder) of Tortoise and a former editor of The Times. A retreat to familiar print ground, perhaps, after the digital start-up has yet to find its financial feet?

There’s also different levels of controversy. While The Spectator saw the immediate exit of Andrew Neil as chairman, and now a switch in editor, The Observer deal has met with serious hostility both from staff, where the NUJ chapel are pushing against it, and from the UK’s cultural elite. 70 luminaries have signed a letter decrying the idea.

Even after reading their letter several times, I’m not quite sure exactly what their worries are. This appears to be the key paragraph:

The immediate financial threat to the newspaper’s journalism, and its staff, is clear. Even if it were to survive, the Observer would be much changed – cut off from its network of foreign correspondents, sports reporters and business journalists. Leading writers, familiar to the paper’s readers for years, would be gone. Guardian supporters would lose the Observer’s voice and presence on the Guardian website and app. And if, as seems inevitable, the Observer’s politics, arts, and culture coverage is to go behind a paywall, then its unique voice in Britain’s national conversation will be muted.

It is, essentially, that the newspaper will be diminished. Without access to both the Scott Trust’s deep pockets and The Guardian’s journalists, The Observer will be lesser than it was. And it might be. But it could also be safer.

What to do with your second string title

The Guardian Media Group hasn’t been that safe and enthusiastic an owner:

Guardian Media Group has owned the Observer, which was founded in 1791, since 1993. It previously looked at closing The Observer in 2009 and turning it into a weekly magazine but the plan was scrapped after a campaign against the move led by Press Gazette.

With GMG struggling financially, it certainly makes strategic sense for it to offload The Observer and concentrate on The Guardian. And one only needs to glance at what has become of the Evening Standard to think that maybe a smaller, enthusiastic owner might be a better bet than a bigger one, where you always play second fiddle.

On the other side of the deal? Well, the motivation is less clear. Alan Rusbridger and Lionel Barber suggested on the Media Confidential podcast that it might be the cachet of owning a print brand. But that’s something that makes sense only to the, well, older generations.

How to defenestrate an editor

And, back at The Spectator, there are also some curious decisions, not least the defenestration of editor Fraser Nelson and his rapid replacement with former Tory MP Michael Gove. Nelson’s last Spectator after 15 years publishes tomorrow. From next week, it’s Govey all the way.

While Nelson’s account of his departure seems all very amicable, the fact that Gove was lined up and ready to go seems rather like this was planned from the start by the new owner. Certainly, some of Nelson's parting column reads like something of a coded warning to the new regime:

When The Spectator succumbs to tribalist temptation, it is most at risk. We were the only weekly to back Brexit (as it wasn’t then called) in the 1975 referendum. At the time, the magazine never shut up about that and it fell into the snare of trying to give ‘thought leadership to the right’. Alexander Chancellor saved the magazine by almost entirely reconstructing it. My first act as editor was to have lunch with him and ask him how he did it. He told me that he saw it as a restoration, not a reinvention, and pointed me to the original Spectator of 1711.

That said, 15 years is a very long time for an editor to stay in place. But Nelson has been notably successfully in both bringing the title into the digital era, while maintaining and growing the print product. Very, very few editors can claim the same.

Replacing such a safe pair of hands with a man who has long been out of journalism carries some substantial risks, as a regular contributor warned in The Telegraph.

New relationships between print and digital

So, on one hand, we have an unprofitable digital startup fighting, against opposition, to buy an unprofitable newspaper. And, on the other, we have a digital company with a wealthy sugar daddy acquiring a successful and profitable magazine — but immediately making significant changes.

If there’s a clear message here, I can’t see it. Other, perhaps, that the relationship between traditional and digital media gets ever more complex as the old order of media breaks down. This feels like a form of creative destruction and remixing at work, as new digital brands and old print brands merge and blend to create something new — or die trying.

Oh, God, I’m going to need a lot more popcorn, aren’t I?