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The British insurance magnate SIR Clive Cowdery should invest in the Nouvel Observateur after agreeing to join the Board of Directors of Tortoise Media, which will produce the first edition of the Sunday Journal internally this weekend.
Tortoise agreed to buy the observer in December at the Guardian Media GroupBecoming the tenth owner of the Sunday Journal 234 years old.
The media start-up officially concluded the agreement on Tuesday at midnight and will publish its first Sunday edition this weekend. He marks a return to the print for the founder of Tortoise James Harding, a former editor -in -chief of the Times, journalist of BBC News and Financial Times.
Speaking at the FT before the first edition of the weekend, Harding said that he would be familiar to the readers of the observer, but with design adjustments and new content. “The oldest Sunday newspaper in the world will also be the most recent. You will see that the newspaper will change, but change gradually,” he said.
The observer will be the main brand of the group in the future, with a subsumed turtle as a sub-brand for content such as long-form surveys.
A cowdery spokesperson confirmed that the insurance contractor – who remained director general of the insurer Resolution Life after his sale of 8.3 billion pounds Sterling in Japanese Japan last year – would take a minority stake in Tortoise.
He added that Cowdery considered the investment as seated alongside his other activities of public interest and supporting a “plurality of voices and good ideas” in Great Britain.
Cowdery has set up the resolution foundation of the leftist thinking group and publishes Prospect, a Current Affairs and Economics magazine. The magazine is published by the former editor -in -chief of the Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, who raised questions about GMG's decision to sell the observer wrongly.
Tortoise has promised to invest 25 million pounds sterling in the newspaper in total, with new funds from Gary Lubner, the South African businessman and donor of the Labor Party, and Standard Investments, which is supported by the American industrial group Standard Industries.
The GMG owner, the Scott Trust, took a 9% stake in Tortoise after having started 5 million pounds sterling.
Friday, the observer will launch his website – the first time he will have a site separated from the Guardian.
The new website will be increasingly important, said Harding. The observer also plans a series of newsletters and podcasts covering news from news to food and culture, as well as an observer television service.
The group plans to introduce a paid wall in the future once the website was established. A marketing campaign will start around the London marathon this weekend for the newspaper, with a second special edition scheduled for the afternoon with a race cover.
“I do not think it is logical that the observer is another daily newspaper just on the seventh day of the week,” said Harding, highlighting his aspirations to follow a similar editorial journey to the American magazine The Atlantic.
“We are not in the process of being a breakup information service; We want to understand what motivates the news. ”
Tortoise agreed to buy the observing newspaper at the end of last year after a Battle of month with staff There and to the goalkeeper.
Journalists of the two titles were concerned about the FInanic perspectives of the media start-up of loss of lossAs well as the future of the observer's reports under an owner who has become known for his events and his podcasting.
Tortoise has undertaken to protect the editorial independence of the observer, to maintain the terms and conditions for the staff and the freelancers, and to almost double the commissioning budget.
He has already hired new journalists, columnists and writers, notably Francisco Garcia, Sam Freedman, Sarah Manavis and Philip Collins.
