When Tortoise bought the Observer, the team behind the New Review supplement decided to build their own publication instead and smashed their three-month targets in a week
It was one of the media stories of last year. A six-year-old media startup acquires the world's oldest Sunday newspaper. But when the sale of the Observer finally went through, around 60 per cent of journalists chose voluntary redundancy rather than transfer to Tortoise Media.
"[Some people] didn't feel at home in the new culture," admits Sarah Donaldson. She and four of her colleagues from the New Review, the paper's flagship culture supplement, launched their own independent news publication in September 2025.
A year on from that landmark deal, Donaldson is now co-founder of The Nerve alongside senior editors Jane Ferguson and Imogen Carter, creative director Lynsey Irvine, and Carole Cadwalladr, the investigative journalist whose 2018 Cambridge Analytica investigation fundamentally shifted the world's understanding of Silicon Valley.
It's an impressive founding team, and they're proving what's possible when experienced journalists embrace the creator economy without sacrificing their editorial standards.
"Google Docs, WhatsApp and Lime Bikes (electric bikes for short hire in London) were the lifesaver," Donaldson says of those early days, offering an honest glimpse into the scrappy reality of launching a media startup, even for a team with this level of legacy media experience.
Whatever happened to high-flying talent on Substack?
