Rich Furness has had one of the most romantic careers in the media, in more ways than one. And now he has taken on his most romantic, not to say quixotic, challenge of all — trying to take the loss-making merged Observer-Tortoise media business to profit alongside his co-chief executive Emma Sullivan.
Rich, no American affectation on his name, there had simply been another boy called Richard at school, began his media career when he saw a small ad in his parent’s copy of The Guardian for a modest clerk’s job in the paper’s circulation department.
He was 25 when he saw that job ad and had been cutting grass at the time for a living. After leaving school at 16, sans GCSEs, he had also been a labourer and a lorry driver.
“I decoded the job ad and told a friend I just think you need a bit of common sense to do that,” says Furness who sent off a CV, borrowed a suit and wore smart shoes for the interview.
“I think they took a chance on me if I am honest. I could talk. I had common sense and enthusiasm and they took a shine to me,” he says now.
Someone else took a shine to him — Anna, the lady from HR who escorted him to his interview.
“That lady, the first person I met at the Guardian is now my wife and we have three children and two dogs. Talk about a life-changing moment,” says Furness who says he has loved working at the Guardian throughout his 30-year-career at the paper.
“I used to sit on people’s desks and ask them what they were doing,” says Furness who worked his way through the marketing department before becoming marketing director. It was the time when the Guardian won a Cannes Lions award for its Three Little Pigs Ad — retelling the story of the Three Little Pigs in the style of The Guardian.
Furness became, in succession, publisher of the print edition, managing director of reader revenues and was chief strategy officer when James Harding founder of Tortoise Media came a-calling to see if the digital company could acquire a famous brand and get into print through buying The Observer.
As is well known, the acquisition of The Observer by Tortoise was a bitter affair with accusations of bad faith, recriminations, a vote of no confidence in Guardian management and finally a strike by journalists.
“There were a lot of red lines we wouldn’t cross. We wanted a secure future for the Observer, so the funding had to be the correct funding. The Scott Trust (which controls both papers) was not going to sell the Observer down the river. It was going to go to a good home if it was going to go at all,” Furness explains.
The executive adds they could have done a deal in secret without telling anyone and then just announce it, something he believes most companies would have done.
“We made a decision to make an announcement, and we would do due diligence and look at the details and I still think that was the right thing to do,” says Furness who admits the management was up against it once the announcement leaked and there was the immediate move to a vote of no confidence.
The row that ensued is history now. In the end, half the Observer journalists accepted redundancy terms. For some, it was a life stage issue, while others were ideologically opposed to The Observer being owned by anyone other than the Scott Trust.
New beginnings
The other half moved to Tortoise and there has been, Furness says, a successful merging of the two news teams.
“The people who are here turned down redundancy pay of around £120,000-£130,000 and moved across and are here because they made a conscious decision to do so and have had a new lease of life as a result.
Furness concedes it could have been a case of Observer journalists in one corner of the building with Tortoise staff in another and never the twain shall meet.
Instead, Furness adds, it’s been a joy to see, without the need for much management encouragement, the way the two newsrooms have come together with Tortoise journalists getting bylines in the Observer for their investigative reporting.
In turn, Observer journalists are featuring in Tortoise podcasts and newsletters.
“You can already see it is more than the sum of the parts,” says Furness who arrived six weeks before the first Observer issue of the new regime on April 27th.
It was preceded a few days earlier by the launch of The Observer’s first ever stand-alone website.
“As we launched our website, the world’s oldest Sunday newspaper is now the newest,” he claims grandly.
The new Observer is already standing out on newsstands with its distinctive, dramatic front-page pictures — on launch day, there was a particularly striking picture of Ukraine’s President Zelensky talking to President Trump amidst the historic splendour of the Vatican.
It has, the co-chief executive says, been well received and has attracted new readers to the Observer.
Premium destination
Furness insists he is “proudly happy” for the Observer to be a second read and create a place where people come to get a sense of the news rather than being a newspaper trying to compete with The Guardian, The Times or the BBC in chasing breaking news.
“What we want to create is a premium destination, and a beautiful read and that is expensive in both printing and distribution,” admits Furness.
He adds that so far, The Observer has seen “an uplift in sales and market share performance and we are very happy with the performance of the paper in the first two months since launch.”
Millions of hits are also being claimed for the brand-new website.
Where did the initial idea come from that Tortoise, an online media group which had come to specialise in podcasts and newsletters losing around £3 million a year, should buy The Observer from The Guardian?
It had been a pro-active approach by former editor of The Times and BBC news director Harding to Anna Bateson, not just the Guardian chief executive but a friend.
“There was a romanticism to the approach to buy the world’s oldest Sunday newspaper and everything it stands for and that was definitely part of it,” Furness says.
“The second was a bit opportunistic, looking for things that Tortoise needed and wanted, that were tangible for its journalism, he says.
They also saw a brand that that was not at the centre of Guardian Media Group strategy, that was being ignored a bit, that didn’t have its own digital presence, nor did it have its own sales or marketing team.
A strong case can be made on paper that the two halves of the deal could turn out to truly complementary. The newish Tortoise would inherit a powerful brand and Tortoise could offer the analogue Observer digital redemption.
The reality of course is that like most paper-based newspapers sales, are dropping and it is no easy thing to build up a digital presence in the online jungle from nothing.
However, the combined business has a strong war chest of £25 million and GMG has retained a minority stake.
The digital challenge
“The challenge is how to build a digital audience from scratch and I think we have got one of the best minds in the business in Jack Riley as chief customer officer,” says Furness. Riley has worked at everywhere from HuffPost and BuzzFeed to The Independent.
His task is to put out a digital offering that people will pay for and the company will be seeking to bring in the likes of Apple News as a partner.
There will be marketing campaigns in the autumn and the Observer newspaper will be used to try to bring in digital audiences to the venture. Likewise, Tortoise’s large reach in audio — a claimed 4 million a day — will also be tapped for new digital subscribers.
“It feels like a unique situation, an historic newspaper coming together with a relatively new digital operation,” Furness concedes.
There are, however, some relevant models elsewhere, he believes.
They are taking a lot of inspiration from The Atlantic in the US, which has become increasingly successful as a combined print and digital operation.
They note other propositions that people are happy to pay for — everything from Private Eye and The Spectator to the New Statesman and The Week.
What about the co-chief executive structure, is that really wise?
“We spent the best part of a year negotiating with each other making this deal happen and know each other incredibly well,” Furness explains.
The demarcation lines have already been thoroughly discussed and set out.
Both executives will be across everything but Furness will have primary responsibility for his strength, marketing, while Sullivan will lead on her main experience, finance and investment.
“I put a lot of thought into it before I accepted the role. We have complementary skills and we will be learning from each other,” he says.
For all the claimed synergies and talk of a good new home for The Observer, can this actually be done in the real world?
Can the new combined Tortoise-Observer business manage to break even within the next three years?
“I think we will have a profitable Observer, with a really strong digital audience buying the Observer digitally and a stabilised ad print sale and maybe even stabilised print subscribers. I think it is absolutely possible. I really do or I wouldn’t be here,” insists Furness.
It would be the most romantic of outcomes of all if Richard Furness and his colleagues managed to pull it off.
This article was first published in InPublishing magazine. If you would like to be added to the free mailing list to receive the magazine, please register here.
