Tortoise is an investigative newsroom based in London started by James Harding, ex-BBC’s head of news, Matthew Barzun, the former US ambassador in London, and Katie Vanneck-Smith, former president of Dow Jones. It was born in 2018 after a Kickstarter funding campaign, and, as the name suggests, what makes the publisher different is that it is focused on slow news. Instead of trying to chase breaking news stories, Tortoise aims at understanding what’s driving the news in an accurate, trustworthy way, viewing it as a response to the crises journalism is currently facing.

Tortoise logo and motto. Credits to Tortoise’s Kickstarter

The outlet defines two problems it aims to tackle – the daily noise that overwhelms readers with hurried-up, partial and confusing information, and the power gap, a divide between the powerful and the powerless, which can be prevented by letting everyone sit at the newsroom table, talk and provide multiple perspectives to stories.

Tortoise aims to be open. As Andrew Butler, Tortoise’s Head of Social, and Alice Sandelson, Head of Strategic Growth, recall to us, Tortoise was built by and for Tortoise members who access the content on their website, their app and through events in their newsroom. Indeed, initially, when Tortoise launched, “Sensemaker” was a key part of the organisation: an analytical newsletter made up of long reads, created to make sense of the world. Other activities members could engage in were events and debates with Tortoise editors, leading thinkers and business partners, so that people themselves could contribute to the newsroom’s editorial output.

Tortoise: slow readers have become listeners

Butler and Sanderson recall the shift from the emphasis on text to audio: “About 18 months into our existence, we realised that asking people to read 2,000 or 3,000 words on a mobile phone wasn’t as effective as we’d hoped. People were getting two or three paragraphs in and we would start to lose them. At the end of 2019, we started experimenting with audio, and what we found was that people kept listening. We were seeing nearly 80% listen through to our podcasts, and we were attracting a younger audience through audio, with an average age of 29.”

This data led the team thinking that audio could be a better vehicle for the kind of slow, investigative journalism that Tortoise wanted to be doing. The shift towards audio was just the beginning of a process, culminating 18 months ago with the decision that Tortoise would become audio-first. Daily “Sensemakers” newsletters are still published, as well as news and events inside the newsroom, but audio is now the primary output of Tortoise’s journalism. Members can log in through the app, website or open RSS feed and find the podcasts pulling into audio platforms like Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

Tortoise’s app. Credits to the design team S-T

Thanks to a couple of hit shows, such as “Sweet Bobby” and “Hoaxed”, Tortoise has now grown a mass of loyal audience off-platform, which has pulled their growth in other ways. An example is a multi-year intellectual property (IP) first look deal with Sky Studios and a multi-show partnership deal with the audio entertainment platform Podimo.

When asked about Tortoise’s target audience now, Butler and Sandelson’s answers are purposefully kept broad: ”Anyone that is looking for considered, investigative journalism is welcome! Naturally our podcasts vary in terms of audience depending on the story. But one thing that is interesting is that our audience tends to skew female, [for] all of our limited series: “Sweet Bobby”, “Hoaxed”, “Pig Iron”… Also, our weekly investigative show the “Slow Newscast”, which skews 57% female, is one of the few news shows that is majority female, which makes the show particularly interesting for brands looking to target a more female audience.”

Going to the place where the audience is – and will be

The shift to audio has been crucial for Tortoise’s business model, as the podcast audience has grown more than three-fold over the past year. Tortoise’s podcast listenership is broadly in line with the general podcasting ecosystem – around half the podcast listenership is under 34, – which indicates that when looking to grow a business, going to the place where that audience is makes a lot of sense. (Currently, there are over 50k paying members of Tortoise. “Sweet Bobby”, Tortoise’s biggest investigative series hit, has had over 10 million downloads, and “The Slow Newscast”, their flagship weekly investigative show, has hit over 3 million downloads).

Sandelson explains this to us: “There is something about the listening experience that has captured that particular market in this moment in time, but it’s really interesting to see how vast the area of growth that still exists is. 50% of UK adults never listen to podcasts, and a further 30% listen only once a month or less often than that, so it definitely feels like more and more people will add podcast listening into their habitual routines. What Tortoise does well is mix up the output in terms of what we publish and when – so we have our daily Sensemaker podcast and our weekly Slow Newscast which are our ‘always on’ shows, but then over the course of the year we’ll release our multi-part series, which are our blockbuster moments where we put Tortoise on the map through word of mouth and pull new audiences in. And then alongside this we always have the ability within our newsroom to be nimble and create the type of podcasts that our audience expect from us as a journalistic outfit. This year we were able to launch Voicemails from Ukraine when Russia’s invasion started, and when the Queen died we published The Second Elizabethan Age. One of our promises as a newsroom is not to chase the headlines but look at what’s driving the news, and those podcasts really helped listeners make sense of the news in a way that is unique to Tortoise and to podcasting.”

Monetising the audience – membership program, selling IP rights

Given the complexity of the model, and the multiple possibilities of choice of digesting the news for Tortoise members, the monetisation model has to be complex as well. Considering the audio business, there are different ways to generate revenue. Tortoise’s off-platform podcasts (i.e. on the RSS feed pulling into podcast apps) generate money through advertising and sponsorships. At the same time, listeners can decide to become members or subscribers of Tortoise, and in exchange for their support to the platform they get audio benefits, including exclusive and early access ad-free listening.

Butler and Sandelson tell us there are currently two ways for listeners to join Tortoise (though the organisation is also exploring other integrations to offer subscriber benefits to a wider audience): ”The first is by becoming a member of Tortoise – you get all exclusive and early access to our audio, plus ad-free listening, but crucially becoming a member of Tortoise also means becoming a member of our newsroom, so you get access to our live events and our daily emails too. We offer the same audio member benefits (exclusive, early-access and ad-free) to subscribers to Tortoise+ on Apple Podcasts – this has been a good revenue driver and something that we have worked hard over the past year to develop, so we were thrilled to see that our channel reached number two on Apple Podcasts subscriptions, particularly given that we have less shows than other channels.”

Additional sources of revenue come from intellectual property (IP) rights: ”one of the interesting trends in the entertainment industry over the past few years is seeing TV and film producers developing series and films having originally been podcasts. We recently signed with Sky Studios who have a first-look deal in place to see which of our podcasts they may want to develop into TV series. We also work with other audio platforms and partners on commissioned content, and we are increasingly exploring how we can syndicate our content into different languages,” Butler and Sandelson said in a joint response.

What about the team? There are now a dozen full-time staff solely working on the organisation’s audio output – editors, executive editors, producers, reporters and sound designers. The roles focused on Tortoise’s marketing and commercial growth are also crucial, as they work closely with the audio team. This composition shows production cannot be separated from marketing and strategic growth, especially if the audience itself is so closely intertwined with the business model.

The role of social media in promoting slow podcasts

At a time when breaking news comes up on social media first, platforms are crucial to promote the slow news idea and build a diverse audience. Considering research about how people discover new podcasts – 30% say they hear through word of mouth and friends, and 31% say they hear about new podcasts through social media, Butler says “Tortoise‘s social media presence probably fits in the middle of that: we are a relatively small newsroom, so word of mouth goes really far in helping get our podcasts out there, but our social media presence is also really important in launching our new podcasts and making sure we’re highlighting key moments from podcasts.

“We are primarily a longform podcasting publisher and therefore some of the most newsworthy moments of the podcasts can come halfway through an episode or series – it’s the job of social media to make sure those bits are picked out, clipped and broadcast through our social media platforms. A good example of this was during our ‘Londongrad’ series: our reporter Paul Caruana Galizia had included a moment where he had a phone call with Boris Johnson’s director of communications, the material of which was quite startling, so it was important to bring that part out of the podcast, turn it into a visual asset for social media and it hugely helped that particular episode of the podcast. Finally, we know that discoverability is a massive challenge: the latest statistic about how people find their podcasts is that 31% of people claim they ‘don’t hear about new podcasts’ – and social media is a crucial channel for that,” Butler notes.

James Harding speaking at one of Tortoise’s Think Ins. Credits to InPublishing

Lessons for the future of “slow” podcasts

Tortoise’s case shows that providing the audience with high quality products while keeping members in the loop is important to build a long-lasting, loyal stream of customers over time. Differentiating the time the content is released and its type helps create variety in the portfolio of a newsroom, i.e. quickly absorbable content in contrast with content that requires more time to be digested: the larger the variety, the more the ways to generate revenues. To reach this goal, letting the production team work closely with strategic growth and social media promotion professionals can be a successful strategy.

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