Tortoise Media has announced the recruitment of Times journalist Rachel Sylvester as political editor of The Observer as it gears up to take over the title later this month.
She replaces existing Observer political editor Toby Helm who has been with the title since 2008 but is leaving with the change of ownership.
Current Tortoise Media political editor Catherine Neilan is to become Observer Whitehall editor.
Update: Observer makes four sport hires as takeover date approaches
More than half The Observer’s existing staff are understood to have decided to leave ahead of its ownership transfer from Guardian Media Group to Tortoise Media.
Guardian Media Group agreed to transfer ownership of The Observer to Tortoise Media in December in a deal based on a plan from Tortoise to invest £20m in the title. The Guardian-owning Scott Trust has also agreed to invest £5m and will retain a 9% stake in the merged business.
The final edition of The Observer under Scott Trust ownership will come out on Easter Sunday, 20 April with the first publication under Tortoise due one week later.
All Observer journalists were offered the option to take voluntary redundancy on enhanced terms if they did not wish to join Tortoise Media and Press Gazette understands the scheme was recently reopened.
At time of writing, Press Gazette understands from several sources that around half of the 70 Observer staff have taken redundancy and around a further six have taken jobs at The Guardian.
The New Review and Magazine teams are understood to have been particularly hard hit by exits.
Both The Guardian and Tortoise declined to comment or confirm the number of redundancies and Observer exits.
Tortoise Media has been advertising for a number of Observer roles including: business editor, deputy news editor, and three production editor roles and deputy books editor on the New Review.
Rachel Sylvester joins ‘long line of exceptional Observer political editors’
Sylvester is a columnist at The Times and chaired its education, health and crime commissions – long-term projects that sought to find new policy solutions working with a wide range of stakeholders.
She is a previous winner of the Political Journalism prize at the British Journalism Awards, having been recognised for a 2016 interview in which Andrea Leadsom suggested she would be a better candidate for Conservative leader than Theresa May because she had children
Sylvester said The Observer was “a newspaper with an amazing tradition of great writing, political insight and cultural breadth at a time when it has ambitious plans to be at the heart of the national debate both now and for the future.
“I’m really looking forward to getting back to writing about the politics of the Labour government, its opponents and the world beyond Westminster.”
Observer editor in chief, and major shareholder of Tortoise, James Harding said: “Rachel has an incredible range of contacts, thoughtful judgment, a beautiful pen and genuine curiosity. We are so pleased and proud that she will be the next in a long line of exceptional political editors of The Observer.”
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