Saviour or threat? Inside the curious world of Observer suitor Tortoise

When “slow news” website Tortoise Media co-hosted the inaugural Kite Festival, a three-day celebration of “ideas and music” at Kirtlington Park estate in Oxfordshire, the start-up hired a nearby manor house for bosses and guests to rest up overnight.
In the event, James Harding, the founder and editor, opted to slum it. Sort of. At the 11th hour, he decided to stay in one of the festival’s luxury glamping tents.
“James had never been to a festival before,” sighs one ex-colleague, who recalls it being a faff for staff to organise a last-minute tent for the boss. “It blew his mind. Real-world things like festivals and camping are a novelty.”
To critics, the short tale of the 2022 Kite Festival, retold by three former employees, neatly encapsulates life at Tortoise, launched in 2019 to champion “slow news” and “wisdom” in the frenetic age of Twitter and 24-7 media.
Kite, co-owned with the French media giant Vivendi and festival organiser Ciro Romano, had no shortage of glamour, with more than 8,000 people drawn in by the promise of appearances from singer Grace Jones and Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei. Yet it made a loss of £1 million.
And while it’s unclear how much of this filtered through to minority investor Tortoise, whose expenses were confined to staff time and a speaker budget, the alumni say the manor house incident exemplified how their company could be lax on costs, and their boss liable to inconvenience employees with impulsiveness.
Tortoise has lost more than £16 million since launch. High-profile journalists have departed or been caught up in redundancy rounds. But so far, the media minnow has avoided much external scrutiny.
This will change if Harding succeeds over the coming weeks in his bid to buy The Observer from Guardian Media Group, whose owner, the £1.3 billion Scott Trust, will meet to discuss the deal tomorrow.
Last week, Guardian and Observer journalists voted for a 48-hour strike in opposition to the deal, demonstrating the level of discontent towards managers amid an increasingly heated row.
Bosses are now busy making “contingency plans” to deal with the disruption. On Friday, managing editors emailed staff to note that protests may form outside their HQ. They said strikers are “permitted to politely talk to colleagues outside the building but cannot physically stop them from entering their place of work”. They added that non-striking employees who need to work from the office, but have “concerns about crossing a picket line”, could contact them for “support”.
Also on Friday, it was reported that Jay Rayner, The Observer’s outgoing restaurant critic, had accused The Guardian in a private Facebook post of employing antisemites. He also allegedly described management’s pursuit of the Tortoise deal as “absurd and deranged”. A Guardian spokesperson said the company has a “zero-tolerance approach to antisemitism” and takes “allegations of this nature extremely seriously”.
As well as feeling anger towards their own bosses, many Observer staff are increasingly wary of their newspaper’s suitor. And Sunday Times interviews with more than ten current and former Tortoise employees shed light on some of the concerns that are building.
Harding, 55, privately educated in London and a Cambridge history graduate, started his career at the Financial Times and rose to become editor of The Times aged 38. He went on to head the BBC newsroom — one of the world’s largest and an employer of thousands of journalists.
His co-founders at Tortoise were Matthew Barzun, the wealthy former US ambassador to the UK, and Katie Vanneck-Smith, a media executive formerly of Dow Jones, publisher of The Wall Street Journal. Together, they raised more than £20 million in their first few years of operation. Backers included Lord (David) Thomson, the Canadian-British billionaire who chairs news giant Thomson Reuters, and Robby Enthoven, the boss of Nando’s.
In a company full of big characters, Harding was the frontman. One former staffer described Tortoise as “The Cult of James Harding”. Another recognised the sentiment.
Harding, at a meeting with The Sunday Times in his HQ, said: “That’s silly. No one gets anything done in journalism on their own.” Other senior Tortoise leaders include creative director Jon Hill, formerly of The Times; editor and partner Ceri Thomas, the former Today programme editor; and news editor Jess Winch, who joined from The Telegraph.
With a sizeable payroll budget, Tortoise enticed some big-name recruits, among them former Spectator editor Matthew d’Ancona, former Newsnight policy editor Chris Cook and chief of staff Emily Benn, the grand-daughter of the late Labour grandee Tony.
Tortoise’s office in Fitzrovia, central London, is likened to a “posh WeWork”. One source recalled “curated soul music” playing in the showers and “vintage gin” being passed around on Thursdays. Another said the building’s operator, Fora, would occasionally hire a masseuse for weary workers.
But some staff found the work was not as agreeable as the workplace. “Nobody had much of an idea what they were doing — it was really quite chaotic,” said one source, recalling their first day. “I just thought: this is crazy.”
Five former employees described Harding as unpredictable. Some were surprised when, in early 2022, he led the start-up remotely from Kenya for about two months. The boss, they said, would regularly change his orders on what Tortoise should focus on, be it long-form articles, photojournalism, events known as “thinkins”, podcasts, newsletters or other projects. “It became impossible to know what kind of business you were walking into in the morning,” said one.
Harding put this down to normal experimentation by a nimble start-up. He said Tortoise invested big in events early on but scaled back after Covid. “We try things,” he said. “Not all of them have worked. Sadly, when they haven’t worked, we’ve had to make the decision to stop them.”
One source said: “When he has an idea, he can make you feel like the most important person in the company. You overlook the frustrations. It’s intoxicating. But then he gets bored — and you won’t necessarily know he’s lost interest until you get made redundant.”
Tortoise currently has 53 employees, down from 73 in 2022. It has run three redundancy rounds, and several senior members of staff have resigned. D’Ancona, Cook and Benn have gone, while the likes of Hill, Thomas and Winch have stayed. Harding said: “I would argue that actually the commitment of people and the longevity of people working here is much more striking than the churn.”
Most prominent among the departures was Vanneck-Smith, Tortoise’s co-founder, publisher and commercial brain, who resigned and later became chief executive of magazine publisher Hearst UK.
Even Harding’s critics concede that he is “chummy” and “charismatic”. One described him as a “genius” on stage at Tortoise events, and added that he has a “really good news sense”. And while there seems to be no shortage of naysayers, some of them no doubt with personal animosity towards Harding, several ex-employees remain loyal.
One praised Tortoise for being an “extraordinarily horizontal” organisation. “I can see why people who have been in a more traditional newsroom might go, ‘What the f***?,’ they added. “You have people with 30-year careers changing copier paper. We took things seriously but we didn’t take ourselves too seriously — that is the culture.”
Another described Harding, a former foreign correspondent who speaks Japanese, Chinese, French and German, as “the most exciting editor in London right now. He really cares about journalism and democracy.”
Tortoise has punched above its weight in industry awards, especially with podcasts. Sweet Bobby, an audio investigation into catfishing — the practice of setting up a fake identity to scam people online — was widely acclaimed and Netflix acquired the rights to turn it into a documentary.
But there are questions over the extent to which industry acclaim has translated into cash. In 2020, it was reported that Tortoise had sold 50,000 memberships, which cost £130 a year and give customers entry to events and early access to content. But ex-staff suggested that most memberships were sold at a discounted rate, either for bulk-buying companies, students or young people. Tortoise declined to provide an updated figure.
Tortoise’s annual revenues surpassed £6 million in 2022. Losses to that date totalled £16 million, and have continued. Tortoise now expects to make a profit in 2025, discounting The Observer.
There is a feeling among some former staff that costs could have been better controlled. One recalled thinking that a “management consultant would have a field day here”. Two sources stated that Harding employs three personal assistants, but in fact, he has only one — the others referred to have more senior roles.
Despite Tortoise’s financial travails, Harding is confident he will raise the funds needed to buy The Observer. It is thought that Tortoise will pay a nominal fee, but Harding has pledged to retain the title’s current budget and invest £25 million over the next five years. Some £5 million will come from expected future profits. His new backers include Gary Lubner, the South African businessman and Labour donor.
However, Harding has struggled to win support at The Observer. Last month, he presented his vision to staff of the newspaper in their conference room. He plans to invest in new business and sports departments, launch a paywalled Observer website and keep the print newspaper alive. Harding, who wants to emulate the success of The Atlantic magazine in the US and The Spectator in the UK, thinks the combined company can earn 173,000 print and digital subscribers and become profitable by 2029.
One attendee told Harding he was “dreaming”. Paul Webster, The Observer’s editor since 2018 who stepped down last week, challenged Harding’s assertions that the paper’s future was imperilled under the current owners.
Webster told The Sunday Times that he felt some of the figures presented by Harding were “wildly inaccurate and over-optimistic”. “James Harding is clearly a very fine journalist,” he added. “But I don’t think a small, loss-making start-up has really got any chance of producing, for any sustained period of time, a Sunday newspaper capable of competing on a Sunday morning.”
The conspiracy theory among some of Harding’s critics is that Tortoise, after sustaining heavy losses, is in need of fresh funding and The Observer deal is a way to obtain it.
Harding, for his part, denies the suggestion that he is performing any kind of fundraising in disguise, and says his new investors are committed regardless of whether the deal completes, although not to the value of £20 million. “That’s not the reason for doing it,” he said. “We have the money. We’re on track to be profitable in the fourth quarter.”
Rather, he wants to offer the title a sustainable future that he feels it would not have under the Guardian Media Group. “The reason for doing it, I think, is seeing The Observer fade away, and thinking, ‘Actually, we can really turn it around.’ ”