Holy Saturday is the day on which many Christians believe Jesus made his triumphant descent into Hell. It is a day of anticipation for what is to come. This year, coincidentally, it marks the final day of production for the Observer, the world’s oldest Sunday paper, under the Guardian Media Group.
About half of Observer staff will leave their King’s Cross offices to join new owners Tortoise in Berners Street, central London. Around six journalists have transferred to the Guardian, while others took voluntary redundancy. Insiders believe the redundancy bill may have hit £3m. Big names such as Toby Helm, Sonia Sodha and Carole Cadwalladr have left.
Magazine staff intending to stay were apparently unimpressed by Tortoise boss James Harding’s reaction to ideas that were presented, and some asked for voluntary redundancy to be reopened. One insider said: “When he was trying to win us over to the idea of the Tortoise bid, he was all ‘hail fellow well met’, but now it has all gone a bit Murdochian.”
And yet after years playing Cinderella to the Guardian, there are surely opportunities for the paper in a digital-first environment in which its brand is deemed to have value. The signings of Rachel Sylvester from the Times as political editor and the multi-award-winning sports writer Paul Hayward have raised hopes. Tortoise remains committed to investing £20m in the title, with the Guardian owners, the Scott Trust, retaining a 9 per cent stake in the business.
The question will be whether Harding will sit back and allow the much-respected Observer editor, Lucy Rock, to edit the title, and whether the brand can gain digital clout at a time when liberal voices are so needed amid the right-wing online clamour.
Observer journalists’ regular Saturday-night haunt, the Lincoln Arms, is usually closed on Easter Saturday, but has agreed to open especially for the team’s last night together. Let’s hope it will be a night of anticipation, rather than a descent into Hell.
On the subject of resurrections, few people have had more than Piers Morgan. Marched out of the Mirror in 2004 over the Iraq pictures scandal, he soon emerged as a judge on America’s and Britain’s Got Talent, before landing a plum spot on CNN’s evening show. When that was canned over his frequent attacks on US gun-toting culture, Morgan reappeared as a great host of Good Morning Britain, skewering hapless politicians. An on-air clash with the weatherman Alex Beresford spelled the end of that episode. Next, Morgan created his own Piers Morgan Uncensored brand, broadcasting on Murdoch’s TalkTV. But viewing figures struggled and last year he walked away.
Now he has risen once again, this time as a would-be media mogul, announcing plans for a series of Uncensored shows to be screened on YouTube. Taking inspiration from US right-wing broadcasters going it alone such as Megyn Kelly and Tucker Carlson, Morgan insists there’s money to be made. Looking to the future, he said: “There will be lots of ‘mini-mes’ running around. I want to go and find the next mes.”
A viewing habit-revolution definitely means new opportunities for commentators to speak directly to an audience on YouTube. But it also risks a surge in the divisive or extreme content that is essential to win the attention war. And it does nothing at all to help fund the news-gathering necessary for such commentators to build their views upon.
It’s been an expensive year for the world’s richest man, and it’s only April. $11bn was wiped off Elon Musk’s companies in the market meltdown following Donald Trump’s tariff announcements. This comes after shares in Tesla almost halved amid the backlash to his cutting of federal government as adviser to Trump.
Now it emerges X could be fined $1bn by EU regulators this summer for breaking the law on preventing illicit content and disinformation on the platform. It would be the first big fine in the EU’s attempt to hold social media companies to account through the Digital Services Act. After the story broke in the New York Times, X’s “global government affairs team” posted on the platform that it would be “an unprecedented act of political censorship and an attack on free speech”. Much of the Trump administration’s obsession with supposed “censorship” in Europe lies in its opposition to the EU challenging disinformation and monopolistic practices on social media through the Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act. Ahead of the US tariff announcements, the investigation into X was slowed, possibly for fear of poking the Trump bear. But now the bear is raging and the EU’s only option is to fight harder.
Who knew sex discrimination existed even in the spirit world? A new survey has revealed female ghosts earn half as much as their male counterparts – ghostwriters, that is. It’s a niche of the publishing industry rarely discussed. After all, who’d want to believe all those top footballers, Love Island stars and politicians aren’t able to knock out 90,000 words of perfect, self-aware prose themselves? Now the Ghostwriters Agency, founded by the former journalists Teena Lyons and Shannon Kyle, is calling for greater visibility: “We have a lot of ghostly gatherings and there’s still a lot of secrecy about fees,” says Lyons.
[See also: What is Trump thinking?]
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This article appears in the 10 Apr 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Spring Special 2025