(Bloomberg) -- The UK’s Guardian Media Group is in talks to sell the Observer, the world’s oldest Sunday newspaper, to online news startup Tortoise Media.
Tortoise has agreed to invest £25 million ($33.1 million) over the next five years in the British title, and to keep publishing a print edition of the approximately 230-year-old paper if the deal goes ahead, the digital news group said in an article on its website.
The negotiations are ongoing and the details remain “commercially sensitive,” the Guardian said in a separate post on its site.
Established British publications, sometimes more than a century old, hold value beyond subscriptions and are seen as politically influential assets in the UK.
The Observer is typically seen as more sympathetic to the Labour Party, which returned to power in July after 14 years in opposition, while most UK newspapers tend to lean to the center-right.
The potential deal follows the sale of the Spectator, which claims to be the world’s oldest weekly magazine still in print, earlier this month to hedge fund billionaire Paul Marshall.
Tortoise, founded in 2019, is backed by financial investors including Thomson Reuters Chairman David Thomson, Lansdowne Partners and Local Globe.
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