The physical disappearance of newspapers on the daily commute in Britain is one of the more obvious signs of the diminishing power of printed media.
Yet each day there are still at least nine titles to choose from on the news-stands.
When titles threaten to vanish there is never any shortage of would-be media moguls ready to take up the cudgels.
A long tussle over future ownership of the Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph titles has reached a critical stage. Exclusive talks with Dovid Efune, proprietor of the New York Sun, expire this week.
Late help has come for the American-backed offer with two prominent British figures – former Chancellor and founder of You Gov Nadhim Zahawi and British-Egyptian billionaire Mohamed Mansour – reported by the FT to be in ‘advanced’ talks to join the US consortium.
At the other end of the political spectrum, the Scott Trust, owner of the Guardian and Observer, is due to decide whether to press ahead with the sale of the Observer to slow news website Tortoise Media.
Scoops: Britain’s printed media continues to break the big stories of the day and set the news agenda
The decision comes in the face of a vote for strike action against the deal by Guardian and Observer colleagues.
The Observer is in reasonable health with a paper circulation of 100,000 copies and made profit of £3million in the last financial year.
The days of ‘It’s The Sun Wot Won It’ – the totemic headline after John Major’s victory in the 1992 election – may be over. Yet newspapers remain agenda-setting and can have a volcanic influence of events.
Mirror revelations of Downing Street ‘parties’ in the pandemic was a nail in the coffin of Boris Johnson’s government.
A series of scoops and regular revelations by from Sunday Times, the Sun and the Daily Mail – joined by the broadcast media – about Keir Starmer’s freebies, and those of his colleagues, turned a triumphal entry to Downing Street into scrambled eggs.
The tussle between press and government has deepened over Labour’s badly received tax-raising budget.
The opportunity to make a difference to national events still makes newspaper ownership an alluring prospect.
It may not yet be a trend. But a different generation of owners is emerging, several of them deeply immersed in the opportunities provided by tech.
Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, who has unlimited resources, is busy seeking to revitalise the Washington Post in the US after previous owners, the Meyer-Graham family, capsized.
The Ochs-Sulzberger dynasty, which has controlled the New York Times for generations, was spared ignominy by former BBC boss Mark Thompson.
His digital-first approach turned around the group’s finances which have since been augmented by the ‘Grey Lady’s’ acquisitions of online sports bible The Athletic and addictive word game Wordle.
Digital is the way forward in the UK. The Independent, spawned after Rupert Murdoch’s printing revolution at Wapping almost four decades ago, has been reinvigorated online and made a healthy £3.5million profit over the last 15 months.
Its embrace of artificial intelligence (AI), to provide foreign language additions, has helped attract 5.7m registered users and reduced dependence on advertising revenues.
The long running uncertainty over the Telegraph’s ownership could soon be at an end.
Early contenders including private equity outfit RedBird, supported by Abu Dhabi funding, and DMGT (owner of the Mail titles) are no longer in contention.
Hedge fund tycoon Paul Marshall swooped in to buy the Spectator out of the Telegraph group for £100million and rapidly installed the mercurial former Cabinet Minister Michael Gove as editor. For the moment, Marshall has faded away as a potential buyer for Telegraph titles.
Almost out of the blue, New York-based digital publisher Efune, backed by heavyweight American commercial funding, has emerged as the most likely new owner with an offer at first thought to be worth up to £550million.
Industry speculation suggests that figure is regarded as very unlikely to be achieved.
The Manchester-born proprietor of the New York Sun has shown consummate skill in taking defunct titles and turning them around.
He began by transforming one of the few Yiddish language papers Algemeiner, closely read in the Charedi Jewish community, into an online English language title reporting on Jewish issues and Israel.
Pledge: Tortoise Media founder James Harding, a former editor of the Times and BBC News, is promising £25m of new investment in the Observer
It was from this small beginning that he took control of the New York Sun, one of the Big Apple’s oldest newspaper brands first published in 1833, which was all but defunct when Efune landed in 2020-21.
He put the broadsheet title, once part of the Pulitzer publishing empire, online,
giving New Yorkers and everyone else a more conservative alternative to the famously liberal New York Times.
Efune’s funding reportedly comes from investment firms Oaktree and Hudson Bay Capital and the family office of US philanthropist Michael Lefell.
The former Telegraph proprietor Conrad Black, who was forced out amid charges of financial wrongdoing two decades ago, is a director of the New York Sun.
The would-be buyer comes from a respected rabbinical family and is a nephew of the Kalms family which founded electronic retailer Dixons, now known as Currys.
Efune’s newspaper background would suggest an intelligent, Right leaning, Israel supporting digital future. Efune is pledging coverage of ‘clear eyed consequential issues of the day’ and describes himself as a ‘lifelong newsman’.
As with all transfers of newspaper ownership, any deal will have to cross the public interest hurdles of media supervisor Ofcom and Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy.
The union hostility among Guardian and Observer staff over the proposed disposal of the world’s oldest Sunday newspaper to online start-up Tortoise is a profound obstacle.
There is, however, a determination by Tortoise founder James Harding, a former editor of the Times and BBC News, to get the job done – and he is promising £25million of new investment in the title.
Disentangling the Obs from the Guardian, where large slices of the paper including City and Sport are jointly produced, won’t be simple. Production arrangements also are shared.
Harding has lined up an eclectic mix of financiers for the deal, including South African tycoon Gary Lubner, formerly of Autoglass, through his ‘This Day’ philanthropic foundation.
His ambition also reportedly is being supported by American asset manager Standard Investment, managed by David Millstone and David Winter. It has stakes in digital media start-ups Puck, Air Mail and publisher Spiegel & Grau.
Historic printed media titles may find themselves under financial pressure and in search of long-term online future.
But there is no shortage of finance, much of it American (as with Premier League football clubs) ready to colonise the digital media future.
In this universe, traditional titles such as the Telegraph and Observer have become the new honeypots for busy bees seeking to revolutionise media finances, lift performance and gain a voice on UK domestic and geo-political events.
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