Jack Riley, Chief Customer Officer at The Observer, explains why the 233-year-old title launched with a single umbrella subscription rather than tiers, how Culture Club became a central retention bet, and why the hardest part of the build has been saying no.
> The Observer launched its first-ever digital subscription in November 2025 at £16 a month or £144 a year, with a single umbrella tier covering print, digital, audio and Culture Club benefits from spring this year. > Culture Club, a set of arts and culture perks worth more than £800, is given to every subscriber instead of being held back for a premium tier. > Early data shows subscribers who engage with multiple parts of the product, from Nigel Slater's recipes to the puzzles to podcasts, are significantly less likely to cancel. > The Salt Path investigation and its podcast and documentary afterlife have been the single biggest growth catalyst since launch. Lessons: > A single, transparent subscription can beat early tiering when you are reintroducing a brand to its audience. > Retention comes from breadth of engagement across a product, not from any one flagship story. > Old brand equity can bridge readers into new daily habits, but only if the product is built to earn that habit.
When Jack Riley joined The Observer in 2025, he inherited separate journalistic businesses rather than one. Tortoise Media built digital infrastructure for audio, events and membership, but not the volume or breadth of content a newspaper needs.
The Observer brought a newsroom with genuine authority and a 233-year history, but none of the digital scaffolding that sits around it. “We really had to design a lot of stuff almost from scratch in order to bring it to life,” Riley says.
The consolidation happened in two waves. The first was making sure the Sunday paper kept getting out of a newly combined newsroom. The second was an open-access sampling site throughout the summer, used to build registration and newsletter lists ahead of a proper launch. What followed was an intense six months of building and prototyping: new iOS and Android apps for phone and tablet, a full website redesign, brand refresh and the subscription infrastructure underneath it, including analytics, paywall logic, access controls and integrations with both the Guardian’s print systems and Tortoise’s existing membership base.
