Sky News reports that Guardian Media Group is in talks to sell The Observer to ‘slow news’ outlet Tortoise Media. GMG chief executive Anna Bateson says this is “an exciting strategic opportunity.” An opportunity to offload…
Liberal media supremo James Harding has championed his “centrist dad media” brand with the help of BBC, the left-wing broadsheets, and millions in initial funding over the course of its 2019 launch. Five years later Tortoise Media has a £4.6 million annual operating loss to show for it, which is up £1.5 million from the year before. On the bright side, not as bad as GMG’s £21 million loss…
According to analytics data from SimilarWeb, Tortoise is struggling to get consumers to read its drawling long-form content, either. Over the last 90 days this is how they have done in terms of reader visits, which Guido has handily compared with another not-for-profit online outlet also founded to do more highbrow journalism:
From July to August alone Tortoise’s traffic dropped by a whopping 41%, and it is now attracting fewer than 500,000 monthly unique visitors. Audiences are hardly crying out for boring, long-winded centrist content…
The Observer is beaten to the bottom of print circulation only by The Guardian. Birds of a feather flock together…
James Harding’s lawfare attack on the Tories has flopped for a second time this year. Guido readers will remember that the former Times editor and BBC News director has been trying since 2022 to sue the Tories for refusing to give out information about its voting membership. Tortoise Media’s second attempt at judicial review has been comprehensively rejected. Justice Fordham also ruled that Tortoise has to pay full costs of £30,000, over double what Harding’s lawyers argued would be “proportionate” costs. The Tories are celebrating the “latest in a line of welcome judgments”…
The court judgement lays out that this is a “clean knock-out blow” at the permission stage as “the claim lacks viability because its public function premise is unsustainable. That is the end of the case.” Back to the drawing board for Harding…
Read the full scathing judgement below:
James Harding’s lawfare attack on the Tories has, as expected, completely flopped. The former Times editor threatened to sue the party last August for their refusal to answer questions about their membership, with Jolyon himself even admitting it would be a losing effort. It turns out Jolyon was right, and Harding’s application for judicial review has been refused as unarguable. He now has to pay the Tories’ legal costs.
The court judgement said:
“As the Defendant is not a public body, nor exercising public functions, it is not susceptible to judicial review by the Claimant on public law grounds such as a failure to take into account relevant considerations…”
Given Harding’s threats evaporated almost as soon as he made them, Guido isn’t exactly surprised. When even the foxbeater reckons you’re going to lose, you probably will…
Read the full damning judgement below:
Guido’s still waiting with bated breath for any updates on James Harding’s twice repeated threat to go to law to force the Tories to reveal their membership voting data. It’s been just over two weeks since Tortoise Media warned CCHQ they were planning to initiate a Judicial Review over the Party’s refusal to answer questions about its membership, and since then, it’s all gone quiet. In Harding’s defence, a lot has changed in world since then, so maybe he forgot he ever sent the letter. Or maybe it just got lost in the post.
Then again, Harding’s also yet to respond to Guido’s own pre-judicial review letter, so it’s possible he’s got a lot of admin to get through first. Guido looks forward to hearing from him soon. The world is waiting…
James Harding is the former editor of The Times, who has raised a reported £20 million for his Tortoise Media “slow news” website. It is just like all the other centrist/ soft-left / remainer websites, so in an effort to distinguish itself from Prospect, The New Statesman, New European and Byline Times etc, he has today decided to try a move out of the Jolyon Maugham lawfare playbook. Harding is threatening to initiate a Judicial Review against the Conservative Party’s for their refusal to answer questions about its membership. This, according to Guido sources, is less of a refusal and, rather, plain indifference. A Tory source tells Guido “Pretty soon Harding will be donning a kimono. Any foxes in his vicinity should be on high alert”…
The pomposity of Harding is manifest, even so, this is ridiculously lacking in self-awareness. So ridiculous that even Jolyon Maugham, a man who triggers Judical Reviews as often as Guido has hangovers, has condemned it as futile and misguided:
If media organisations are now to be able to threaten private organisations with Judicial Reviews, Guido thought he should write to James at Tortoise Media and ask them where they get the millions they are wasting:
The public via the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA) has awarded £50,000 to Tortoise Media, the online publisher on a mission to slow down and open up journalism. It has opened up journalism by doing things like (Guido has counted them) hiring 13 people who studied at Oxford University.
The public’s money is funding live discussion events called “Think Ins”, in local newsrooms in Grimsby, Plymouth and East Marsh. Co-conspirators who have attended tell Guido they are like a liberal hand-wringing therapy session. The idea, they told NESTA in their funding application, was to “pave the way towards a sustainable future for local journalism, based on real-life conversations in communities”. How sustainable is the Tortoise model of journalism?
According to a Guido source on the inside, everyone knows it’s not working and James Harding runs it like a private fiefdom. The same source says they employ some 60 people* with a monthly wages-only bill in the hundreds of thousands. They now publish two pieces a day.
The source says
“Its whatever James Harding is interested in, and so he’s creating a magazine for himself. But his contacts and world view are so 2008. His speed dial political contact is Andrew Feldman. Him and Matthew d’Ancona are like visitors from another era. Of their claimed 26,000 members, 6,000 are people who were part of the Kickstarter campaign before they launched, 5,000 are student members, 14,000 are ‘network members’ which is a bulk buying scam where corporates buy cheap memberships for disadvantaged people who supposedly don’t have access to good media, and then they of course never log on. And 1,000 proper members, who actually read the site. Articles normally get reads measured in the hundreds, thousands is like hallelujah.”
Guido ran a comparison a few months ago which supporters said was unfair and not comparing like-with-like, so we have repeated the comparison with a like-for-like: Unherd, another not-for-profit online publisher that was also founded to do more highbrow journalism not covered so well elsewhere. Over the last 90 days this is how they have done in terms of reader visits, with only a handful of staff Unherd is beating Tortoise in readership terms by a factor of ten:
That chasm in reader numbers is not narrowing, the month of February was just as dire:
*LinkedIn says they have 82 employees.
