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?
The Nerve runs on Beehiiv, and it's become the first UK publication accepted into the platform's Media Collective programme. It's a significant coup. The programme provides perks like health insurance, legal support including pre-publication review and errors and omissions coverage, plus access to tools like Perplexity Pro and Getty Images, which is very valuable for a startup.
"Beehiiv has had a big success in the US and they want to recruit big journo talent in the UK," she says.
It opted against newsletter competitor Substack because the platform couldn't provide the customisability the team felt it needed. A clear, distinctive design was seen as a must in the creator ecosystem.
"We had legacy media experience so we were not interested in this easy option."
Starting small, thinking big
For now, The Nerve publishes two newsletters per week - a weekday edition on Tuesdays and a weekend edition on Fridays, via a beta site. But the ambitions are big: regular events, a biannual magazine launching in 2026, hard-hitting investigations, and a rollout of audio and video content.
It has both free and paid-for tiers of memberships, the latter bundling in various perks including priority booking for events. This scales up to founding members, who, amongst the benefits, will get their names published in the first magazine in 2026.
So far so good for The Nerve: it has acquired 17,000 free subscribers and over 2,000 paying members. It surpassed its three month target in the first week of operation.
But its audience growth strategy flies in the face of current trends of audience-centricity. "We didn't start from the position of who our ideal reader is," Donaldson says. "We wanted to do amazing journalism and then see who the reader is."
Part of the success is also thought to be from an impressive roster of early contributors, like actor Adjoa Andoh, broadcaster Carol Vorderman, and photographer and filmmaker Misan Harriman. Former Observer columnists, comedian Stewart Lee and psychotherapist Philippa Perry have signed on, as have critics Ellen E Jones and Dorian Lynskey.
Powered by women
There's another notable element worth highlighting: all five founders are women. This was not intentional, Donaldson explains.
"We were a team that was working together for a very long time. We just decided to keep on working together.
"We didn't decide to be an all-woman team, but we are probably only the third title launched by women-only," after Spare Rib (a feminist publication that closed in 1993) and gal-dem (an independent publication for black women and non-binary people closed in 2023).
Her advice for aspiring media entrepreneurs? "Work with people you know and don't be afraid to jump in the deep end."
This article was drafted with the help of an AI assistant before it was edited by a human
