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In 2016, the British newspaper The Independent published its final ever print edition. As the BuzzFeed News reporter Jim Waterson put it at the time, the paper “went out on a scoop”—a front-page story about a British connection in a plot to kill a Saudi royal—as well as by printing no fewer than four special magazine supplements, with contributions from the authors Sebastian Faulks and Helen Fielding (of Bridget Jones fame) among others. A major British paper going out of print was a big deal, and as I recall, much of the commentary around the news was valedictory in tone. But The Independent painted itself more as a pioneer: it was going digital-only. “The bird next to the masthead is taking flight again, and countless others will follow where this eagle dared,” Amol Rajan, the editor, wrote, referring to the paper’s logo. “What seems radical now will, I believe, be vindicated by history.”
Fast-forward eight years. The digital Independent appears to be consistently profitable. And earlier this year, it was involved in an eye-catching piece of business, entering into a licensing deal to take control of the UK arm of BuzzFeed and its sub-brands, including the UK edition of HuffPost. The parties involved touted their complementary editorial values and audiences; ultimately, the deal was a play to entice advertisers. “The digital media and advertising market is pretty dire for all publishers in 2024, so a merger is a logical response,” Alex DeGroote, a media analyst, told The Guardian after word of a deal started to circulate. “This will give The Independent more scale, eyeballs, and resources,” while giving BuzzFeed the ability, should it choose, to “cut off UK losses and focus purely on US operations.”
As media deals go, this one was hardly seismic in its consequences for the landscape. (The brands involved would remain separate.) But, as various other outlets noted, it was symbolically significant. I am from the UK and interned at BuzzFeed News in New York in 2017, when it felt like a red-hot place to be (think: The Dossier); if you’d told me then that its British arm would be licensed to The Independent within a decade, I’d have said, “That Independent?!” And yet, as the digital-only Independent climbed to profitability, BuzzFeed News entered a spiral of decline. It effectively shuttered its UK newsroom in 2020; then, last year, BuzzFeed News shut down altogether. The rest of BuzzFeed (think: The Dress) survived. But if, as The Guardian put it, BuzzFeed UK was once “looked upon with envy by legacy publishers,” the Independent deal seemed to signal a major shift of industry sands.
The Independent–BuzzFeed tie-up was only one of several noteworthy deals in what has been a busy twelve months for the British media business; as Bron Maher of Press Gazette, a publication that covers the industry, told me, there have been “a lot more musical chairs” this year than in years past. Taken together, these and other developments—from layoffs and yet more print cuts to scrappy new players working to fill those gaps—reflect several high-level trends that are visible in the media business everywhere: financial insecurity, changing consumption habits, the inexorable march of digital progress (and the perhaps slightly more exorable march of AI). But a number of these developments have, at the same time, challenged common assumptions about who gets to overtake—and take over—whom.
I last wrote about the British news business in this newsletter back in April, when I took note of its parlous state and recent layoffs everywhere from Reach, a major chain of local and national newspapers, to openDemocracy, a smaller nonprofit investigative site. At the time, the head of the BBC had just hinted that the broadcaster would make cuts; since then, it has eliminated some two hundred and seventy positions across its news, current affairs, media operations, and local and regional teams, according to Press Gazette. There have been sharp cuts, too, at the UK version of Reader’s Digest (which shut down altogether), the upstart right-wing network GB News, and across various national and local newspapers. The Evening Standard, a free paper commonly distributed outside of Tube stations in London (then left all over the seats), made significant cuts.
Indeed, the Evening Standard—whose ultimate majority owner is Evgeny Lebedev, a controversial Russian businessman whose dad was in the KGB, and who is also a significant minority stakeholder in The Independent—is now the London Standard: in September, it rebranded as it shifted from a daily schedule to publish only once a week. If The Independent has been profitable in recent years, its sister title has reportedly hemorrhaged money; announcing the shift to a weekly edition, the Standard’s CEO blamed changing commuting patterns in the wake of the pandemic as well as more extensive Wi-Fi availability on the Tube, and pledged to replicate The Independent’s digital course. As if to underscore the point, the first issue of the weekly Standard made notable use of AI, deploying the technology to generate a cover image that vaguely resembled the British prime minister, Keir Starmer, as well as a “review” by the infamous Standard art critic Brian Sewell (Tracey Emin: “ignorant, inarticulate, talentless, loutish and now very rich”; Banksy: “should have been put down at birth”), who died in 2015. The Standard said that Sewell’s estate was “delighted” by the AI column, though the Guardian art critic Jonathan Jones was less complimentary. (“The chatbot used by the Standard needs to be fed a lot more novels by Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell, some Latin perhaps, and a mouthful of plums,” he wrote, adding that the article failed in part because it wasn’t “offensive enough.”)
As has been the case when traditional local outlets have retrenched elsewhere, scrappy newer players have stepped up to try and fill the gap. Mill Media—a buzzy, expanding chain of news sites that offers in-depth coverage of several major British cities, backed by investors including Mark Thompson, now the head of CNN—launched a London operation in October. And, just as the Standard was going weekly, Waterson—the onetime BuzzFeed reporter we met at the top of this newsletter—launched an initiative of his own on Substack, rooted in the belief that while the British media is often accused of being London-centric, granular local coverage of London as a city is thin on the ground. He duly called his publication London Centric, promising “No clickbait. No bullshit. No oligarchs pulling the strings.” He has since published stories with headlines like “Why is London’s phone signal so bad?,” “Harry Potter and the unpaid tax bill,” and “Who funds the London Standard?” (in which Waterson confronted Lebedev with reports that the answer is, in part, Saudi Arabia).
Between BuzzFeed and London Centric, Waterson was a media reporter at The Guardian; earlier this year, he took a buyout along with a few other prominent journalists as the paper looked to save costs. Before the year was out, the Scott Trust, The Guardian’s owner, would find itself at the center of perhaps the most consequential of this year’s British media deals when it entered talks to sell The Observer, The Guardian’s storied Sunday sister paper, to Tortoise Media, a digital startup founded in 2019 by James Harding, a former director of BBC News, among others. Tortoise doesn’t fit the braggadocious mold of a BuzzFeed-type startup: its founding promise was to offer “slow journalism,” and it is now known for its high-quality long-form audio content. Still, the proposed deal subverted the typical pattern of “a small- or medium-sized fish being swallowed by a larger fish,” Steven Barnett, a communications professor at Westminster University, told me. In some ways, the idea of the deal excited Barnett—Tortoise, he said, has proven adept at “riding that tide” of changing news consumption habits online—but “in pure branding terms, it just doesn’t feel like the kind of fit where you go, Yeah, that works.”
Many journalists at The Observer and The Guardian seemed to agree, and had myriad other concerns besides. Carole Cadwalladr—a prominent reporter who helped break open the Cambridge Analytica story, and writes for The Observer on a freelance basis—publicly criticized the proposed deal as “the beginning of the end of our newspaper,” and slammed the paper’s bosses as “an active threat to press freedom.” (A coalition of press freedom groups didn’t use quite that language, but also had some questions.) Many journalists at the two papers felt that they had not been properly consulted (despite management claims to the contrary), while expressing fears about the impact of Observer journalism (which is currently free online) going behind a paywall, and the health of Tortoise’s finances. (The company has only ever registered losses, though it said last year it had been investing to ensure future profitability; its latest accounts are expected soon.) Eventually, they voted to strike for the first time in fifty years. Two weeks ago, journalists picketed The Guardian’s headquarters, chanting slogans like “Keep your Tortoise off our grass.” Last week, they walked out again.
In between the pair of strikes, however, the deal to sell The Observer to Tortoise was agreed to in principle. The Scott Trust insisted that the deal would result in twenty-five million pounds of new investment into The Observer, that the paper’s print edition would be protected, and that Tortoise would build its digital brand. (Currently, Observer stories are nearly indistinguishable from Guardian offerings online.) The Scott Trust also pledged to remain part-owners of the paper and said that they would play a role on Tortoise’s editorial and commercial boards.
Finally, two other venerable publications have been in limbo this year: the Telegraph and The Spectator, a pair of right-wing onetime sister titles. That isn’t new: I wrote about the pair a year ago after a bank effectively seized them from their prior owners, the Barclay family, over unpaid debts, and amid a takeover push that was fronted by Jeff Zucker, the former head of CNN, and funded by the United Arab Emirates. But that push would founder after various UK lawmakers expressed concerns about Emirati meddling and the government passed a law blocking foreign states from controlling periodicals; Zucker insisted that the Emirati investors didn’t intend to interfere (and suggested that their bid had scared parts of the UK’s political establishment), but the titles went back up for sale. The Telegraph still doesn’t have a buyer: at time of writing, Dovid Efune, the British-born owner of the New York Sun, was in pole position, but was reportedly struggling to nail down financing. (This morning, Arthur MacMillan is out with a deep dive for CJR on the Telegraph’s “auction from hell.”) But The Spectator—known as the bible of the Conservative Party, and once edited by Boris Johnson—was sold: to Paul Marshall, a financier with deep interests in other right-wing British outlets, including GB News. Soon after he took over, The Spectator appointed Michael Gove—a onetime journalist who more recently was a long-serving Conservative minister—as its new editor. (Gove had reportedly wanted the job since he was seven.)
This year’s British media moves were in a lot of respects very different, though many of them can be seen through the prism of one pressing global question: as Barnett put it to me, “how the fuck do you make journalism pay these days?” Their (in many cases odd) particulars demonstrate the breadth of possible answers to that question—as well as the many apparent pitfalls of each—and that media fortunes do not always rise and fall in predictable rhythms. But Marshall’s takeover of The Spectator—and, perhaps, Efune’s interest in the Telegraph—serve as a reminder that money isn’t everything in the media business: owners often want political influence, too—perhaps especially in the UK, and on its political right in particular. When we spoke, Barnett started to describe this as a new model, then caught himself. “It’s a hundred-year-old model,” he said. An eagle, perhaps, flying into the past.
Correction: This article has been updated to clarify Evgeny Lebedev’s relationship to The Independent.
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