Tortoise Media

Tortoise investigations have won awards, changed policies, forced ministers to resign and been read or listened to millions of times. They include Master and Octopus, major exposés of the author Neil Gaiman and the financier Crispin Odey respectively; Sweet Bobby, a podcast about catfishing that topped the UK and US charts and became a Netflix documentary; and Pig Iron, an investigation into a young war reporter killed in South Sudan. Our flagship investigative podcast, The Slow Newscast, tells a different story each week, covering everything from Pfizer’s influence over vaccines to Pornhub’s secret owner to Tory megadonors. Alongside podcasts, the Daily Sensemaker newsletter reaches an audience of 100,000 readers. Tortoise has won Best Podcast at the Foreign Press Awards; Innovation of the Year at the British Journalism Awards, Publisher of the Year and Best Documentary at the British Podcast Awards and two Wincott Awards, to name a few. In 2024, Tortoise was named Publisher of the Year at the British Podcast Awards. In 2023 Tortoise published the Westminster Accounts in partnership with Sky News, an innovative public tool that tracks how money flows around Westminster that won multiple awards, including an RTS award for Innovation. In 2024 we followed this up with Peer Review, which lets the public investigate who is in the House of Lords, how they got there and ultimately the role they play in British democracy.

The Observer is one of the great names in journalism. It’s the world’s oldest Sunday newspaper, a place for investigative reporting, independent thinking and an intelligent guide to interesting living. We will revive The Observer as a strong, independent voice in liberal journalism. We believe the paper has huge potential to produce agenda-setting, public interest journalism across the week. We’re excited about combining The Observer’s strengths with our own expertise in audio and digital investigations, to build a thriving 21st-century news business.

Tortoise took ownership of The Observer on Tuesday 22 April 2025. The Observer will become a seven day a week digital publication, complemented by its weekly Sunday print edition. We believe in its future, both in digital and as a multi-section newspaper published each and every Sunday.

All Tortoise Media shareholders are listed on Companies House. New investors include Standard Investments, a backer of media start-ups in the US, and This Day, Gary Lubner’s philanthropic foundation. All are in for the long term. Their backing is the first substantial new investment in a liberal news media company in the UK in decades. No investor has a controlling stake.

All our investors sign up as part of their shareholding to the principle of editorial independence. We have an editorial board to ensure journalistic freedom and editorial independence chaired by Richard Lambert, the former editor of the Financial Times.