The State Kremlin Palace in Moscow was commissioned by Soviet President Nikita Khrushchev as a cavernous home for meetings of the Communist Party and as a second stage for the Bolshoi Theatre. In June 2006, more than 1,700 editors gathered there for the opening day of the World Association of Newspapers Congress.

Gavin O’Reilly, as president of the global organisation of the world’s press, was hosting the event, which was to be attended by Russia’s president Vladimir Putin.

Putin had perhaps signalled his contempt for the free press by showing up five minutes after the conference was due to end. O’Reilly, however, took him on in a speech widely covered by the BBC, The Guardian and The Washington Post.

“Your country and your administration have been severely criticised internationally for an alleged unwillingness to forego control and influence over the media,” O’Reilly said.

He criticised overt state control of the media as well as the acquisition of influence by oligarchs who were buying up the press or paying for stories to disguise their past crimes. 

“There is still very widespread scepticism, both inside and outside your country, about whether there exists any real willingness to see the media become a financially strong, influential and independent participant in Russian society today,” O’Reilly said.

Putin took to the podium to respond. “Mr O’Reilly spoke about the increasing state presence in the media. I have different information on this point,” he said.

“Without a free press, the great transformations of the 1990s would have been simply impossible, and today I would like once again to underline the not only special but irreplaceable role of the written word in the making of the new Russia.”

Within four months of Putin saying this, one of Russia’s most courageous journalists, Anna Politkovskaya, the author of Putin’s Russia, was murdered by contract killers.

And as the years went on, O’Reilly was shown to be more than right to be concerned about the freedom of the press in Russia, and the influence of powerful oligarchs. 

Sitting in the audience of editors that day, listening, was Matt Kelly, a seasoned journalist with The Daily Mirror, and other newspapers.

O’Reilly, for his part, was chief operating officer of Independent News & Media, which was then a global media publisher.

On the fringes of the Kremlin based event the two men met briefly for the first time.

Assembling a new deal for The New European

Gavin O’Reilly was in France when we spoke late on Sunday evening. He had kept in touch with Matt Kelly over the years, and they had a mutual friend in the high profile broadcaster Piers Morgan, a former editor of the The Daily Mirror.

And at midnight last night Kelly and O’Reilly became business partners after a deal closed to acquire The New European, an award-winning print and digital publication.

A new company called The New European Ltd has bought The New European from British regional publishers Archant. Kelly will become chief executive, editor-in-chief, and majority shareholder in the business.

O’Reilly, meanwhile, will become executive chairman of the company having helped Kelly buy The New European and raise fresh funding to expand it.

The investors assembled by Kelly and O’Reilly have extensive media and technology experience. They include former BBC director-general and New York Times chief executive Mark Thompson, the co-founder of fintech TransferWise Taavet Hinrikus and the former Financial Times editor Lionel Barber.

Robin Klein, the founding partner at LocalGlobe and an early investor in LoveFilm, Zoopla and Farfetch, is also a backer as is Barry Maloney, the founder of Balderton Capital. Former Archant boss Jeff Henry, who originally backed Kelly in launching The New European in July 2016, is an investor.

O’Reilly told The Currency that he’d been a reader and a fan of The New European, but it wasn’t until last October when Kelly rang him that he started thinking about it as a business. 

“How did the opportunity arise? Well, Archant was bought by private equity some time ago. It is essentially a regional newspaper group based in Norwich. Having a national weekly periodical didn’t really fit,” O’Reilly said. “Matt said ‘I am the only guy who can buy as it’s in my DNA. What do you think about doing an MBO with me?’”

“At that stage I knew nothing about the financials,” O’Reilly said. “But we built a business case and then when we were happy with that thankfully Archant was a willing seller.”

“We then went through our Rolodexes and identified people who might be interested in investing. We got a great group of investors. A lot of them were known to Matt, some to both of us, and some known to me like Barry (Maloney).”

“It is a really interesting group of investors who I think share our belief that this a paper that has yet to reach its true potential.”

O’Reilly said The New European had by necessity historically a tight budget but it had also proven itself to be profitable. “It has found its niche,” O’Reilly said.

“Matt was the brains and the architect behind The New European. It was set-up originally as a pop-up intended to only last for a few months but then it got some traction, and suddenly it took off. It started as a paper for the 48 per cent (who voted No to Brexit) but obviously Brexit has now happened so it needs to morph. Britain has left the EU but at the same time there remains a need for a centrist pro-European periodical. The New European fills that need.”

“We don’t need a string of offices”

In a statement issued this morning Matt Kelly said:

“I’m very excited to lead this next, new chapter in the remarkable life of The New European, building on its success of the past several years. Since the Referendum, The New European has shown that there is a significant market for high-quality, informative, provocative and entertaining journalism written for an audience who care deeply about both Britain and Europe’s future. With new investment capital in place and seasoned media investors, we have a very clear vision of how we can better enhance the experience for our readers and employ new innovations and product developments.”

The New European is published weekly and between retail, home subscription, and digital it has a circulation of 20,000 a week. In print, it retails in Britain and Ireland, and some other European capitals. Its website has two million page views monthly. All in all, it is a decent business, but with considerable room to grow.

I ask O’Reilly what changes are in the pipeline. “What you see right now online is not what we’re going to look like in four or five months time,” he said. “Originally they launched the paper first and it was another four or five months until they had a website. We are planning on investing heavily in digital, mobile, web and an app.”

Will you try and grow more into Europe, and go after the same market Politico has? “Politico is a very impressive and very specialised publication. It has gotten, and really gets, into the weeds and it needs to. The New European won’t seek to compete at that level,” he said.

“This is a pro-European centrist periodical. Its providence and base are in Britain but that doesn’t have to be to the exclusion of other markets.

“If the last while has proven anything it has shown that we don’t need a string of offices,” O’Reilly said. “Matt has been brilliant at getting talented contributors and stringers to write for us. We have a very small team and we will be adding it.

“But we don’t want a big central fixed cost. We want to have flexibility. We want to identify talent all across Europe and become a home where readers can get opinions and views whether in print or digital.”

*****

Gavin O’Reilly resigned from INM in 2012, after a long-running dispute with the businessman Denis O’Brien, who poured hundreds of millions into becoming the media group’s largest shareholder only to later lose most of his money when he eventually sold out. 

I ask O’Reilly had he always planned to get back into the media industry where he has spent most of his career? “I wasn’t planning necessarily to get back. But the business case is compelling, Matt is a superb partner, and the investors bring more than just money. They share the vision that we share in terms of building a very vibrant centrist pro-European periodical.”

O’Reilly said he had already dipped his toe back into the media in 2018 via a media tech business called Axate. Founded by Dominic Young, a News International veteran, Axate makes it easy for publishers to monetise articles on a pay-as-you-go basis. “I am an investor in Axate and its chairman so tangentially I was already back in newspapers,” O’Reilly said. “But what Matt and his team have done with The New European is tremendous. He did it all on a shoestring. With more resources and the calibre of strategic investors, The New European now has we can do so much more.”

O’Reilly is also chairman of Red Flag, the strategic communications and advisory firm founded by former INM executive Karl Brophy.