Meet Jane Bruton, editor, Weekend Sensemaker

Tortoise Media was launched in 2019 by James Harding, a former editor of The Times and later director of news and current affairs at the BBC. With a remit to look at what's "driving the news" rather than chase breaking news, the start-up attracted around 50,000 paid-for subscribers within two years and thousands more signed up for its daily emails. Refocusing long reads into "long listens" has paid off with downloads of its investigative podcasts, including the popular true-crime catfish exposé, Sweet Bobby, numbering the millions. Members and guests are even invited into the newsroom's ThinkIns to debate important topics of the day and have their say, in person or online. Bruton explains how its newest addition, Weekend Sensemaker, which is delivered to readers' inboxes on Saturday mornings at 7 am, fits into the operation.

James Harding set up Tortoise because he felt there was so much noise around the news. The internet and social media had seen newsrooms get smaller but with fewer people putting out a greater number of stories. Yet no one was thinking, why does that story matter, what's behind it, and is that an important story or not? James was frustrated and wanted to cut through that noise with a brilliant team of investigative journalists.

The Daily Sensemaker email is about making sense of the news, the Weekend Sensemaker is taking everything that is brilliant about that and applying it to people. Our remit is huge - everything from popular culture to high culture, and the power players within that. We look at who is going to be on your radar and why. We start with a news column written by Liz Moseley [writer and former chief marketing officer at Cannes Lions], followed by other news in brief, and another column written by journalist Stephen Armstrong around culture.

Our top story, when we launched on 4 March, was It's all gone wackadoodle at Fox. We covered the Fox News-Dominion case at the beginning of March because we had a sense that the story would become huge. We looked at the people that mattered in the case, what was driving it and why it was important to our readers.

In terms of the culture column, we're not just reviewing things, we're explaining why they are culturally important: The latest Creed movie's importance within the Rocky franchise in terms of diversity, or the success of young Hollywood studio A24, the first studio to win all six top Oscars, for example.

We're a small newsroom but we punch above our weight because we're good at getting to the heart of a story. It's very different to the enormous team I had at the Telegraph with different desks for culture, a different critic for every discipline and a whole features desk for two magazines and the newspaper features content. But everyone here has brilliant contacts, so there's always someone you can talk to who can get you an "in" somewhere. We get to pick up the phone to power players to talk about other power players. It feels like we're creating something new.

Our audience is very engaged. The target audience for Tortoise is quite broad because of the audio element but unlike most newsrooms, overall, it's got a 60 per cent female skew. The website is 44 per cent under the age of 44, which is very different to The Times, Telegraph or BBC. The podcasts have about 12 per cent Gen Z, which is unheard of in major news organisations. The people who read the emails skew older, many are in senior management positions and on FTSE-100 company boards. They're a very engaged audience, our open rates are high at over 40 per cent, and they come to our ThinkIns. You feel very close to the audience, which is brilliant.

A press release sent to everyone sometimes leads to a story but it's a bit of a scattergun approach. PR works better if it's targeted. Think about who the Tortoise audience is and why this story might interest us, rather than just banging out something that goes to everybody.

It's still so important for journalists to have personal relationships with PRs. You want them to think of you first, so you get those exclusive stories. I don't want to be cross because I read a story elsewhere that I could have got. 

I recently went to a press day and I got a great story from talking to the PR. Repeating a press release is never going to cut the mustard with our audience. You can't just give them something that they might have read elsewhere. If it is a topic they've read about, we bring something new to the table.

There's scope for commercial partnerships with the right partners. Octopus Energy just sponsored our Mel's Electric Adventure podcast about electric cars. Our annual Kite Festival in June is a combination of great talks over a weekend with music in the evening. It attracts an eclectic bunch of people - big thinkers - and it's a lot of fun.

It's important for PRs and brands to tell us what they're looking for. I recently met with some agency leaders. One explained that what works for them is to say [to media partners], ‘Here are the five things that our brand is about. You go and do what you want with it because you know your audience.' That's a really refreshing approach.

Developing Grazia's 10 Hot Stories from a page to a section [mixing hard news and celebrity] was a lightbulb moment. I joined Grazia three months before launch and it was a learning curve adapting an Italian title. What was right for Italy wasn't right for the UK. We developed a whole new ethos and kept experimenting until we got it right. The ‘news and shoes' mix of content reflected how people think: why can't we be interested in reading about global news (today it could be Sudan), turn the page to see what's happening at LVMH turn again, and then ask, "how's that in fashion?" Women can go to the theatre and then go home to watch Love Island. Just because you're interested in shoes, doesn't mean you're not interested in news.

One of my proudest moments was Grazia's successful Mind the Gap campaign [which in 2015 helped change the law to introduce gender gap pay reporting]. We pressed hard but feared it wasn't going to go through, then it was put as an amendment to another bill. That day I got a call from [then Labour MP] Gloria De Piero, who was amazing in supporting the campaign, telling me and my associate editor Vicki Harper to come to the Commons. She managed to get us into the chamber, and we were sitting there when Grazia's name was read out. It was incredible.

If you can really engage with the reader and really get in their head, that's how you win. Throughout my career, I've always thought about the reader. One of my first magazine roles was on Chat, whose audience demographic was different from most of the places I've worked since, but it taught me how important the reader is in bringing their stories to life. That stayed with me.

https://www.tortoisemedia.com